A Comparative Study Of Love Meatphor In English And Chinese Poems

In traditional study, metaphor used to be confined mostly to literature and rhetoric. According to Lakoff and Johnson, the founder of cognitive linguistics, the human conceptual systems are inevitably structured by metaphor. Metaphor has an effect on the patterns of thinking and cognition of human beings. The metaphorical expression in language is the superficial embodiment of metaphorical thinking, and the cultural knowledge is the source of the conceptualization of metaphor.Recent years, the focus of metaphor research has turned to emotion metaphor, and the study, employing daily utterances as corpus, mainly concerns with the emotions like happiness, angry, sadness and fear etc. But there is relatively less study on love metaphor in poems. Poetry is a special way to convey emotions, and there are plenty of rich metaphors in it. Therefore the study of poetic metaphor gradually becomes a new field for the linguists.The thesis first introduces the history of metaphor research and its current study, and illustrates the working mechanism of metaphor. Then the thesis conducts a cross-cultural research on love metaphor in English and Chinese poems. It has found that metaphors are pervasive in poems, and there are many similar love metaphors in both English and Chinese poems. But the differences in economic patterns, religious beliefs and mythological legends,etc. between two peoples also cause the specific love metaphor in English and Chinese poems. These differences indicate that metaphors contain abundant cultural features, and cultural relativity leads to the diversity of conceptual metaphors among different nations.This thesis proves that metaphor has the features of both universality and diversity in poetry, aiming to support modern metaphor theory. The study is useful to comprehend and translate the poems; it is also helpful to deeply understand the relations between the metaphor and culture, and the relation between metaphor and thinking. What's more it is instructive to explain the cognitive process of human beings.