| Languages, which carry and reflect cultures, boast a close tie with cultures. The language of a nation definitely reflects its own cultural characteristics. Both China and South Korea have their own national languages and language systems. Both of the two languages contain a large amount of human body words, which are closely related to human lives and reflect different cognitive styles towards humans and human bodies, as well as different ways of thinking, values, customs, etc. Comparatively, there are more phrases about human body parts, especially about the five sense organs like eyes, mouth, nose, ears and tongue. In all the human organs, eyes express human inner emotions in the earliest, fastest and most direct way. Hence, eye-related phrases take a considerable proportion in all the five sense organs.Based on interpretations of EYE in Chinese and Korean dictionaries, this paper makes analyses on differences and similarities between the two interpretations and on expanded eye-related expressions. Vast numbers of eye-related idiomatic expressions in Chinese and Korean languages are collected from dictionaries and literatures in both languages and classified by their meanings and expressing forms according to the theory of conceptual metaphor. Meanwhile, the cognitive linguistics theory and contrastive linguistics method are applied in order to make difference-similarity analysis. As human beings have common cognitive model and both China and Korean belong to Confucius and Chinese culture circle, with similar origins and ideography. there are quite a number of similarities between Chinese and Korean eye-related idiomatic expressions. However, belonging to different language families, the two languages have tremendous differences in pronunciations, vocabularies, grammars, pragmatics, etc. Moreover, distinctions exist in the two countries’ language cultures and national cultures. All those contribute to the differences between Chinese and Korean eye-related idiomatic expressions. |
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