A Corpus-based Analysis Of Spatial Metaphors Of LEFT And RIGHT

Under the framework of cognitive linguistics，metaphor is regardedas the cognitive tool for people to recognize the world. Spatialmetaphor is that people use the basic spatial concepts to understandabstract ideas through a mapping across domains. The paper takes thespatial words LEFT and RIGHT as examples to explore their spatial usesand metaphorical extensions under the guidance of cognitivelinguistics. It aims to analyze how the spatial senses map to themetaphorical extensions and how to interpreter the spatial metaphorssystematically.The study adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods andprovides abundant evidence for spatial uses and metaphoricalextensions. From the British National Corpus (BNC), with LEFT and RIGHTas node words,912LEFT and975RIGHT chosen randomly are used asthe raw data to study the spatial uses and the metaphorical extensionsof LEFT and RIGHT. Two types of spatial senses: static model anddynamic model are found. Meanwhile, the metaphorical extensionscan be classified into two groups: symmetrical metaphors andasymmetrical metaphors. In addition, the metaphorical uses incollocations are also analyzed.The paper draws the conclusions on the basis of its analysis that:(1)LEFT and RIGHT are symmetrical in the spatial use;(2) LEFT and RIGHT arecomplement in the metaphorical use;(3) RIGHT has more metaphoricaluses than that of LEFT;(4) People prefer using RIGHT to LEFT due to theculture preference.It is hoped that the corpus-based study on metaphor would helpthe learners better understand the spatial metaphors.