A Contrastive Analysis Of English And Chinese Conceptual Metaphor For Basic Human Emotions

Metaphor, as a ubiquitous phenomenon of language, is pervasive in our ordinary language. The study of metaphor has a long history which covers more than two thousand years and different theories have come into existence on the basis of the research. Traditional approaches to metaphor represented by Aristotle regard metaphor as a rhetorical device functioning on the level of words and as a deviation from the ordinary mode of language working. While the interaction theory appearing after them represented by Black regards metaphor as the interaction between two different subject systems and this theory paves the way for the emergence of cognitive view on metaphor. Metaphor study enters a new phase---the cognitive approach.But what is acknowledged as the landmark in the cognitive approach to metaphor is the influential work Metaphors We Live by written by Lakoff and Johnson, in which they put forward the concept of conceptual metaphor and point out the essence of metaphor.When it comes to expounding the working mechanism of the conceptual metaphor, the cognitive linguists introduce "source domain" and "target domain" to account for the mapping between them. To put it clearly, the cognitive power of the conceptual metaphor lies in the mapping from the concrete, familiar and highly structured source domain to the abstract, unfamiliar and inherently unstructured target domain. However, metaphorical mappings are not produced at random, for they are governed by the human bodily experience.Emotions, as one of the most pervasive and basic aspects of human experience, have always been the focuses of cognitive linguistics. Human cognition and emotions can affect each other. The study of human emotions forms one of the basic parts of the probe into human cognition. Human being's emotions are rich and varied, like happiness, anger, sadness, fear, love, hatred and so on. However, these emotions are abstract and hard to clarify. Therefore, people often conceptualize them in order to vividly depict them. Some linguists have already conducted researches on metaphors of emotions, but the majority of them have been made within English. In view of the facts mentioned above and the current situation of emotion studies, the present dissertation makes a contrastive analysis on the conceptual metaphors of four basic emotions between English and Chinese---happiness, anger, fear and sadness, exploring the similarities and differences between them on the basis of cognitive commonness and cultural diversities.As this study shows, English and Chinese share some similarities as well as some differences in the conceptualization of the four basic emotions. The similarities can be attributed to the common human bodily experiences of the two peoples while the differences can be explained by resorting to the different cultural models of the two countries.Grounded on the analysis of a large quantity of linguistic data from English and Chinese, the present dissertation has made a rather complete and systematic study of emotion metaphors from the cognitive perspective. This study may develop the contemporary cognitive theory of metaphor from the domain of emotions:abstract concepts like human emotions are largely comprehended and expressed through metaphors; emotion metaphors are rooted in bodily experience and are influenced by cultural models as well, namely, conceptual metaphors of emotions are characterized by cognitive commonness and cultural diversity. Meanwhile, this study is also expected to make a little contribution to the implications of this comparison to the areas of cross-cultural communication and foreign language teaching.