A Cognitive Study Of "Hair" Metaphors In English And Chinese

The studies on metaphor have been conducted for a long time of more than two thousand years. Generally, metaphor had been confined to rhetoric in a long history. In recent years, however, metaphor studies have broken through the area of rhetoric, and it is considered the basic pattern of human cognition. In the1970s, the metaphor studies came to a remarkable new epoch. In the perspective of cognitive linguists, human beings perceive the outside world in embodied manner. Human beings’ cognition rule determines that human body and organs are the basis of human experience and cognition. The metaphorization of body part terms is one of the basic means of forming and expressing concepts.Large numbers of studies on body metaphors have been done; however, detailed investigation on "hair" metaphors, which is worth investigating, has not been reported up to now. Hair is considered an important part of human body and hair behaves abundant metaphor properties. This thesis aims to elucidate the similarities and dissimilarities of metaphor construction and metaphor working mechanism of "hair" metaphors between English and Chinese, in which a contrastive study is required on the basis of cognitive characteristics of metaphorical terms relating to hair.Metaphor, essentially, is a systematic and partial mapping from the source domain to the target domain (Lakoff,1993), that is, as a basic cognitive structure, metaphor allows us to comprehend a relatively abstract concept by virtue of a more concrete concept. Based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Mapping Theory and Image Schema, this thesis will make a contrastive study on the cognitive features of metaphorical expressions involving the English hair and Chinese tou-fa (头发). The studies of the similarities and dissimilarities between English hair and Chinese tou-fa are evaluated, and the factors causing these dissimilarities are also analyzed. The analysis of hair metaphors is utilized to probe into similarities and differences of Chinese and English cognition. It helps us understand the metaphorical means of the body part terms, and also has a significant enlightenment to the foreign language teaching and learning. The major findings of this thesis are as follows:(1) English and Chinese have the same literal meaning of hair:the substance that looks like a mass of fine threads growing especially on the head; one of these threads growing on the body of people.(2) English and Chinese share the same image schemas:HAIR AS A CONTAINER; HAIR IS IMPORTANT.(3) Mapping of hair metaphors can be divided into five major types:mapping from hair domain to address domain; mapping from hair domain to color domain; mapping from hair domain to emotion domain; mapping from hair domain to political domain; mapping from hair domain to social role domain.(4) There are similarities and dissimilarities of hair metaphors between English and Chinese.