| With the rising of the cognitive linguistics, especially with the publishing of the book Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff&Johnson, a great change has occurred in the study of metaphor. Traditional metaphor theories merely regard metaphor as the embellishment of language, or a play of words, whereas the cognitive view sees metaphor as a way of cognition, a way of perceiving an abstract conceptual domain by means of a concrete and familiar conceptual domain. According to the cognitive view, metaphor does not only exist in language, but also exist in our life and thought. Lakoff and Johnson introduced the term "conceptual metaphor", and reckon that conceptual metaphor is a cross domain mapping. For instance, the conceptual metaphor "LOVE IS A JOURNEY" is a mapping from the source domain (journey) to the target domain (love). Because of the mapping, what can be used to describe journey can then be used to depict love, such as "Our love has come to an end","This is a bumpy road" and so on. Thus, each conceptual metaphor is a system, which can give birth to a systematic series of metaphorical expressions. Still taking the conceptual metaphor "LOVE IS A JOURNEY" as an example, it generates a set of metaphorical expressions like "Our love has come to an end","This is a bumpy road", etc.Love, as the most abstract, mysterious and subtle emotion in the whole world, can not be well understood, perceived, experienced or expressed without using conceptual metaphors. This has been true of the past, the present, China and elsewhere. Therefore, the study of conceptual metaphors of love will help us better understand people’s cognition of love. Research on the conceptual metaphors of love abounds. However, there has been little research done from the perspective of the gender commonness and difference. Thus, this dissertation, based on the theory of the conceptual metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, studies the metaphoric expressions of love in more than one hundred English love poems, attempts to find out the underlying conceptual metaphors behind these linguistic expressions, and makes a comparative analysis of the similarities and differences between male and female as manifested in the conceptual metaphors of love in question. This dissertation attempts to discover the commonness and dissimilarities between the conceptual metaphors of love used by male and female and to probe into the underlying factors that can account for these differences and similarities.The dissertation finds that in English the love conceptual metaphors used by male and those used by female share more commonness than differences. The English love conceptual metaphors used by both male and female are:LOVE IS A UNITY; LOVE IS A FORCE; LOVE IS A PERSON; LOVE IS A PLANT; LOVE IS AN ECONOMIC EXCHANGE, and so on. Those used specifically by female are:LOVE IS PROTECTION; LOVE IS JEWELRY; and THE OBJECT OF LOVE IS A SOCIAL SUPERIOR. And those used specifically by male are:LOVE IS HUNTING; THE OBJECT OF LOVE IS A DEITY; THE OBJECT OF LOVE IS BEAUTY. The dissertation also discovers that identical physiological responses to love and the similar cultural environment are the main reasons for the similarities between the English conceptual metaphors of love used by male and female, and differences in physiological features and especially differences in the social experiences mainly account for the dissimilarities.The significance of the comparative study of the love conceptual metaphors used by male and female is as follows:applying the theory of the conceptual metaphor to the study of genders, understanding the male and female psychology about love through conceptual metaphors, learning about the gender differences and similarities as manifested in the love conceptual metaphors they use, appreciating the rich variety of different love expressions used by female and male and ultimately offering some guide to the appropriate use of the colorful linguistic love metaphors to Chinese learners of English. |
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