A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study Of Spatial Metaphorical Cognition Of English And Chinese

Metaphor, traditionally regarded as a figure of speech, has been familiar to people since2000years ago. However, it is not until1980s that the cognitive function of metaphors was established and emphasized although it had already been considered as a way of cognition for a long time.With the time going on, besides they study the essence of the metaphorical features in cognition, the formation and operation of the mechanism of the cognitive metaphor, the current research of metaphorical cognition stills faces other important issues:to begin with, the fundamental research of the metaphorical system should be done not only just in English but also in other languages so as to prove that not only can the abstract thinking be realized by cognitive metaphors in English but also in other languages. Furthermore, based on the issue above, another problem pops up:the universality and relativity of the metaphorical system have to be considered for the reason that some metaphorical mappings are universal and pervasive, while some others can only survive in a certain specific culture.Since it is impossible to probe into every dimension of the metaphorical cognition, the present thesis only focuses on the four spatial words up, down, shang, xia as examples, to realize the objective of this thesis for the reason that in the cognitive study. a primacy is given to space, which is regarded as the most vivid and direct representation of human being’s experience; of all of the spatial relations, the vertical relations of up and down(shang and xia) occupies the privileged position, and moreover, spatial metaphor plays the most important part in metaphor.Based on the achievement of the cognitive metaphorical study both at home and abroad, the present paper proposes the hypothesis that there exist the universality and relativity between the metaphorical systems of different languages. After extracting the examples at random from British National Corpus (BNC) and Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU (CCL), the data is processed and classified. Based on the data processed, we can conclude that the remarkable universality and relativity exist between the metaphorical extensions of UP/DOWN and SHANG/XIA, from which the hypothesis is further deducted.Then, on the bases of the examples, the similarities and discrepancies of English and Chinese metaphorical systems are concluded:When the image schematic structures of UP/DOWN and SHANG/XIA are all mapped onto the target domain of QUANANTITY, SOCIAL HIERACHY, and STATE, there are remarkable correspondence between one another, but when the image structures of UP/DOWN and SHANG/XIA are mapped onto the domain of TIME, the huge discrepancies appears. At last, the causes of this phenomenon are intended to be explored, which will further support the hypothesis illustrated.