A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of Plant Metaphors Between Chinese And English

Metaphor has traditionally been studied by scholars in rhetorical and linguistic fields.With the birth and development of cognitive linguistics in recent years, more and moreattention has been paid to how language operates in mind. It has been found that people’sconceptual system, which functions in the progress of human cognition, is metaphorical. So itis also proved that language is metaphorical theory. In recent years, metaphor studies havebecome increasingly popular in the field of cognitive science.There exist a plenty of plant metaphors, but few scholars extended their study into thefield of plant metaphors. Some papers on plant metaphors are merely limited to a brief list ofsome metaphor phenomena from the perspective of similarity. Most of the former studies dotheir research from the perspective of the culture and pragmatic meaning; they don’t takemetaphor as a cognitive tool for our conceptualization of the world. Those studies on plantterms are mainly focused on the differences of the cultural-loaded meanings of certain plantwords. There are no comprehensive and systematic classification, description and contrast ofplant metaphors in English and Chinese. Those studies haven’t systematically explored themapping process of plant metaphors. Such studies ignore the cognition process of producingplant metaphors and understanding plant metaphors. Based on above consideration, the authortries to make a contrastive analysis of plant metaphors from the perspective of cognitivelinguistic. This research does not only focus on presenting similarities and differences ofEnglish plant metaphors and Chinese metaphors, but also focus on uncovering the cognitiveuniversality and cultural relativity behind those linguistic phenomena. Based on these studies,we can draw below conclusions. First, plant metaphor is a production of conceptual metaphorof our thought. People use plant metaphor to understand and experience the unfamiliar,abstract, intangible things. There exist similarities of plant metaphors between Chinese andEnglish. These similarities are derived from the cognitive universality and common bodilyexperiences. Meanwhile, there exist a great deal of differences of plant metaphors in Englishand Chinese. These differences are derived from the cultural relativity. Both Chinese andEnglish have many culturally specific features which influence the thought and language. This paper will be a supplement of the study of plant metaphor and will shed light onforeign language learning.