A Contrastive Study Of Cultural Metaphors Between People’s Daily And Guardian

Cultural metaphor, as a new way to study national culture, refers to any activity, or institution with which members of a given culture emotionally and/or cognitively identify. Gannon studies the cultural values among different countries with cultural metaphor as a method. Cultural metaphor develops based on contemporary cognitive metaphor, and makes use of the combination of research achievements of metaphor and culture. The thesis employs comparative study and data collection research methodology and chooses corpora from People’s Daily and Guardian to analyze Chinese and British cultural metaphors. The aim is to analyze cultural values and the differences of cultural features between Britain and China through establishing the frame of cultural metaphors. The major findings of the thesis are that Chinese family, traditional British house and other cultural metaphors can reflect similarities and differences of Chinese and British social cultural values. The conclusion of the thesis is the similarities between the two countries are sticking to traditional ways and heritage systems; the differences embody in Confucianism, harmonious ideas in China; individualism, freedom and equality, rational spirit in Britain. It concludes the causes for cross-cultural metaphor differences. It is hoped that the tentative study under the guidance of cultural metaphors will reflect the social reality of China and Britain vividly, and give a hand to foreigners to learn Chinese and English; meanwhile it can promote cultural communication in negotiations among China and foreign countries.