A Corpora-based Contrastive Analysis On Body Movement Metaphors In Chinese And English

In traditonal sense, metaphor has been viewed as a figure of speech and deviance from literal language. With the publication of Lakoff & Johnson's book Metaphors We Live By, the research on metaphor has been approached from a cognitive view. Lakoff & Johnson stated that metaphor is a basic way of human thinking, a process of conceptual mapping--expriences in familiar domain are mapped in those less familiar domain. Since then the research on metaphor from a cognitive view has become extremely popular around the world. With the introduction of this theory to China, our researchers have been working their own explanations with the framework set up by Lakoff & Johnson, among which are contrastive studies on metaphor between Chinese and English .This paper is an intention to analyse the similarity and differences of the human body movement metaphors between Chinese and English through examplications collected through online corpora. According to the working mechanism of metaphor, the author classifies the human body movement metaphors into four types; from external to internal type, from internal to external type, bottom up type and top down type. This study has found out that many body movements in both languages have the same or similar metaphorical expressions because of the common psychology and physical basis, while differences also exist which are affected by the social culture and customs.Through the contrastive study on the mephorical expressions of the human body movement, this paper reinforces the theory that the human body metaphor are based on the universalities of cognition and are related to its own culture. Meanwhile, this paper is a supplement to studies on human body metaphor and foreign language teaching of intercultural communication. Moreover, this paper also intends to show that Internet is a huge asset to future linguistic researches with its vast resources and technologies.