A Cognitive Study Of Emotional Metaphors Of Joy/喜悦and Anger/愤æ€'

In today’s society emotion is considered as the central and most pervasive aspect of human experience. Thus how to conceptualize emotion is always an issue of concern. According to contemporary theories, metaphor is a matter of people’s thought and reason. As it is an important cognitive tool, it reveals how people perceive unfamiliar, abstract concepts via familiar, concrete ones on the basis of bodily experience. The purpose of this paper is to study how "joy" and "anger"-two basic emotional concepts are metaphorized in English and Chinese from a cognitive perspective. Furthermore, it looks in depth at the reasons for similarities and differences between English and Chinese metaphors about "joy" and "anger".A large number of emotion metaphors in both English and Chinese are investigated in this thesis. Firstly, after a comprehensive comparison of these emotion metaphors, some major conceptual metaphors are found to be shared by English and Chinese in the conceptualization of these two emotions. Concerning joy/喜悦and anger/愤æ€',both English and Chinese employ the JOY/喜悦IS UP or JOY/喜悦IS LIGHT conceptual metaphor while ANGER/愤æ€'IS FIRE or ANGER/愤æ€'IS THE HOT FLUID IN A CONTAINER; in respect of ANGER, they have ANGER IS HEAT in common. These similarities can be attributed to the common human bodily experience of the two countries. However, differences do occur between the two languages in describing these emotions. For example, English presumes JOY IS BIGN OFF THE GROUND, while Chinese regards JOY IS IMMORTAL. As for the central metaphor ANGER IS HEAT, English prefers the FLUID metaphor, while Chinese favors theæ°”(GAS) metaphor. Furthermore, when describing emotions through the physiological effects, Chinese tend to utilize more body parts, especially more internal organs to conceptualize these emotions. And it seems that the selection of certain body parts over others is not at random. The above differences cannot be well explained without resorting to the cultural models in which English and Chinese emotion metaphors are conditioned. And this thesis attempts to account for the differences by referring to the Yin-Yang Theory in Chinese philosophy, the Theory of Five Elements in traditional Chinese medicine, and the Chinese "union of heaven and man" opposite to the Western "binary devision of subject and object". On the basis of contrastive analysis of "joy" and "anger" metaphors, from English and Chinese corpus, this study verifies the metaphor theories formulated about emotion metaphors:based on common bodily experience, universalities exist in emotion metaphors in different languages; meanwhile there are culturally specific characteristics governed by different cultural models. It is found that differences between English and Chinese "joy" and "anger" metaphors have a close relationship with Chinese traditional philosophy and Western cultures. It is hoped that the findings and results would fill the gap in "joy" and "anger" metaphor studies and provide implications for learning emotion words in foreign languages.