A Comparative Study Of Emotion Metaphor In English And Chinese

Emotion is the most universal and important aspect of human experience.Emotion is people’s attitude to and experience of the objective world. Human emotionis abstract and abundant in language, and interacts with cognition. The research ofhuman emotion is one of the most important parts after exploration of humancognition. In order to express human emotion accurately, we usually specify orconceptualize them, i.e. metaphorically. Metaphor plays an important role in theconceptualization of emotion.The study of metaphor dates back to as early as 2000 years ago. Traditionalapproaches to metaphor regarded metaphor as a rhetorical device on the level ofwords and as a deviation from the ordinary mode of working of language. In the1970s, there was a boom on metaphor research. With the reflection carried out byresearch in various disciplines, metaphor obtains rebirth through its connection withthought. Among them, the most important theory is the conceptual metaphor which isrepresented by Lakoff and Johnson in their seminal book (Metaphors We Live By).The central thesis of the theory is that metaphor is pervasive and ubiquitous ineveryday life, not just in language but also in thought and action. Metaphor is a wayof thinking. It is a basic ability of people to use the experience in a familiar cognitivedomain to analyze and understand a new cognitive domain.In this thesis, the author makes a cognitive analysis of the expressions of fivecommon emotions in our daily life by means of comparative way, and discusses the similarities and differences between English and Chinese emotion metaphor from theperspective of cognitive types and explore the causes of differences between Englishand Chinese emotion metaphor. This thesis focuses on the comparative study ofemotion metaphor in English and Chinese. The topic of emotion metaphor isdiscussed from five basic emotional perspectives: happiness, anger, sadness, fear andlove. Conceptual metaphor theory is the theoretical basis of the study. After theanalysis of data, it is not difficult to draw the conclusion. The common point ofemotion metaphor behind its working mechanism is its experience which is also thedistinction of emotion metaphor. The deep causes behind the cognitive model of thedifferences between English and Chinese emotion metaphor are varied. Generallyspeaking, social culture causes the differences. There are many aspects of socialculture such as natural environment, values, religions and social activities. In a word,emotion metaphors are rooted in body experience, but at the same time, they are alsoinfluenced by social culture.