A Comparative Study Of Love Metaphor In Ancient And Modern Chinese Poetry

Metaphor is originally known as a concept of rhetoric. During the developmentof metaphor studies, it has been considered as a basic of cognitive mechanismcontemporarily. According to Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theories, metaphor is abasic way of human cognitive mechanism and metaphor is cross-domain mappingbetween a concrete domain and an abstract domain. It is systematic, generative andgeneralized, etc. In this essay, the author plans to conduct a comparative study of lovemetaphor in ancient and modern Chinese poetry. Through this research, the authoraims to find out:(1) What are the similarities of love metaphor in ancient and modernChinese poetry?(2) How are they similar or different in cognitive mechanism?(3)Why are there similarities or differences of love metaphor in ancient and modernChinese poetry? An analysis of poetic metaphor is embodied by the research of lovemetaphor, which is chosen because the poems about love appear in all kinds of poemsand express the true feelings of human beings. The thesis draws a conclusion that asthe influence of cognitive, cultural and semantic factors, love metaphor representsdifferent connotations in China as time passed.This essay is designed with5parts. Chapter1introduces the general backgroundof conducting the study, how different it is from the former papers and the overallstructure of the thesis. Chapter2reviews the development of metaphor theory,definition, classification of metaphor and cognitive approach to metaphor andmetaphor studies at home and abroad. The overview of Chinese poetry is introduced in this chapter to provide the readers a general understanding of Chinese Poetry.Chapter3raises the research questions and definite how the poetry are selected,analyzed and presented. Chapter4makes a contrastive study of love metaphor inancient and modern Chinese poetry, and analysis the similarities or differencesthrough Cognitive Mechanism, Image Schemas, Source Domain by CMT, also try toanalysis the reason why there are such similarities and differences among Lovemetaphor, the reasons are mainly from the perspective of cultural cognition model,bodily experience and economic pattern and so on. Chapter5summaries the majorconclusions of the study and also issue some limitations of the study, provides somesuggestions for future studies.