A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Body Metaphors

"In ancient China, people get inspirations by observing human bodies and theuniverse". It is the law of human cognition that People know the world from the easyto the complex, from the concrete to the abstract, from familiar things to unfamiliarthings. Because people are familiar with their bodies and organs, they often nameconcrete and abstract concepts from other domains after their body parts according tothe similarities of position and function of human organs. Both in Chinese andEnglish, there are a large number of body words, which is the foundation ofmetaphorization. Human physiological structure and experience are inevitably used tocognize the objective world. Body metaphor is a way of describing andcomprehending the world. As a language phenomenon, Metaphor is an important formof expression. Because expressions reflect the thinking pattern of cognition, language,thinking and metaphor are closely related. The essence of body metaphor is to use thebody domain to explain other domains. At first people use their body as a referencepoint to cognize the objective world, for it is the most direct way to know things andthe world. Ancient people know about their body and use metaphor analogizes thingsin the world, which reflects people’s interaction with the world. This article applies therelevant knowledge of cognitive linguistics to analyze human body words and idiomsin Chinese and English and concludes that there exist differences and similaritiesbetween the Chinese and English body metaphor of human body, and reveal thatreveal different cultural psychology behind linguistic phenomenon as well as thereasons. This article uses "heart, eye, mouth, head, face," to carry out comparativestudy. Through comparative analysis, we know that there exist similarities anddifferences between Chinese and English body metaphor. What is in common is thatthey have same physiological structure and cognitive processes, both of them try tounderstand the world through body experience. Difference is the different nations usethe metaphor in the deep cultural imprint. What is different is that Chinese andEnglish body metaphor are influenced their own culture. These differences are causedby many factors, such as cultural patterns, natural environment and so on. This article analyzes Chinese and English body metaphor from the regional, culture, thinking,moral concepts perspectives and concludes that there exist different metaphoricalexpressions. In this paper, the research is of great help to human body words andidioms, and is of great importance in intercultural communication, vocabulary,translation, contrastive linguistics.