Contrastive Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphor For Love In English And Chinese From Cultural Perspective

With the rising of cognitive linguistics, metaphors are paid more attention by linguists. Metaphors are so pervasive in expressing some abstract emotions such as love and anger that it seems that they play an important role in our expressing emotions. Love is a universal emotion shared by people from different countries. Since love is an abstract concept, people would always resort to metaphors to express their love. Conceptual metaphors concerning love in both English and Chinese are everywhere in both literature and everyday communication. To analyze conceptual metaphor concerned love is a great issue in cognition.The thesis has mainly collected conceptual metaphors concerning love in English and Chinese literature works, and discusses the love metaphors from cultural angle. Because of the similarity of human activities, a lot of love metaphors are shared by both English speakers and Chinese speakers. Meanwhile, variations of conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese also exist. What is clear is conceptual metaphor cannot be separated from its historical or regional culture environment. Reasons of the causes of variations of conceptual metaphors on love are briefly explained in this thesis in order to help English learner know more about universality and variations of English and Chinese conceptual metaphors.