A CMT-based Contrastive Study Of Metaphorical Expressions Of Basic Emotions In English And Chinese

Metaphor used to be regarded as a rhetorical device, that is, a linguisticphenomenon. With the reflections carried out by researchers in various disciplines,metaphor obtains rebirth. The beginning of this new theory of metaphor is marked bythe publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s seminal work Metaphors We Live By in1980.They hold that metaphor is pervasive and ubiquitous in human’s language and thought.It is in essence a model of thought and a cognitive tool, by which human beingsunderstand the surrounding world (Lakoff&Johnson1980:5). Conceptual metaphoris an important concept in cognitive linguistics, which allows people to illustrate orcomprehend a relatively abstract conceptual domain by a more concrete one.Emotion and cognition interact with and mutually affect each other. The study ofhuman emotions constitutes an essential part of human cognition. Human emotionsare abstract and abundant. In order to have a better understanding of the expressionsof these emotions, people often conceptualize them metaphorically. Manypsychologists have claimed that certain emotions are more basic than others. PaulEkman’s view of the emotions is pervasive in psychology and is explicitly shaped tobe compatible with evolutionary thinking. He holds that basic emotions are emotionsthat have a certain facial expression associated with it, including anger, disgust, fear,joy, sadness and surprise (Ekman1982:39-55).This thesis makes a contrastive study of the metaphorical expressions forexpressing happiness, anger, sadness, and fear in English and Chinese from theperspective of cognitive linguistics, with the aim of exploring the similarities anddifferences between the two languages in terms of the expression of the four basicemotions and probing how human shared experience and cultural variations influencethe conceptualization of the four emotions. The present research finds out that there are many similarities in the major metaphorical expressions for the four basicemotions in English and Chinese, and at the same time, the differences between themcan not be ignored. The similarities can be attributed to the common human bodilyand life experience, while the differences may have resulted from different culturalbackgrounds and the different values of the speakers of the two languages. This thesisattempts to account for these differences by mainly referring to the geographicalconditions, cultural values and traditional cultures of the two different groups oflanguages users.