A Corpus-based Study On "Eye" Metaphors

Metaphor is a commonly used phenomenon in our daily life.Body metaphor is an essential part of metaphor. Human beings begintheir cognition of the world from knowing their bodies, because bodiesare the most familiar objects for them. Thus, in the daily life, they createmany metaphors related to the body parts. This thesis analyzes “eye”metaphors in English, with the help of BNC.We classify “eye” metaphors into seven categories accordingto different meanings of “eye”, which are: objects in the form of eye,sight and vision, perspectives or viewpoints, attention and observation,person, emotions, and expectation and plan. The mappings of “eye”metaphors are from “eye” domains to concrete domains and from“eye” domains to abstract domains.The features of “eye” metaphors are discussed from theperspectives of number, mappings and collocation. The results indicatethat singular form of “eye” is more commonly used in “eye” metaphorsthan its plural form; three metaphorical meanings of “eye” arecommonly used, which are: sight and vision, perspectives or viewpointsand attention and observation; most of the target domains in “eye”metaphors are abstract objects; the basis of mappings are physical orsocial experience; mappings of “eye” metaphors are asymmetricaland partial; verbs which co-occur with “eye/eyes” frequently don’talways have strong collocability with “eye/eyes”; three kinds of verbsare frequently used in “eye” metaphors, which convey the meanings of“continuous state”,“direction in actions” and “change of the action”.