A Corpus-based Study On The Metaphorical Extensions Of UP And DOWN In English And Chinese

What is "metaphor"? From ancient times to the present, a lot of scholars have worked on it, such as Comparison Theory of Aristotle, Substitution Theory of Quintillian. and Interactive Theory from Richards. Nevertheless, since Lakoff and Johnson, cognitive theory has gotten more and more approval and attention. According to cognitive linguists, metaphor is an important cognitive tool, also a way of thinking human beings depend on, and in our daily life we always use metaphorical extensions of concrete things to construe abstract things. Lakoff and Johnson divide cognitive metaphors into Structural Metaphors, Orientational Metaphors and Ontological Metaphors in their Metaphors We Live by. The metaphorical extensions of UP and DOWN in Chinese and English belong to Orientational Metaphors. When we are born, space is the first concept we can experience, such as up-down, in-out, front-back, etc. Therefore space is often used to construe some non-spatial and abstract concepts.Up and down are the most basic concepts among all the spatial orientations, and hence, the metaphorical meanings of UP and DOWN are often studied by linguists. Lan Chun also has studied the metaphorical extensions of UP and DOWN in English and Chinese and analyzed four target domains. STATE. QUANTITY. TIME and SOCIAL HIERARCHY. But the author thinks that her analysis of three target domains. STATE. QUANTITY, and TIIME. is not enough. In addition. during her contrasting the metaphorical extensions of SHANG/XIA and UP/DOWN, similarities are paid more attention to while the explanation of discrepancies is not enough. Therefore, the author will go further and study the metaphorical extensions of SHANG/XIA and UP/DOWN based on the analysis of Lan Chun.First, samples with UP/SHANG and DOWN/XIA are selected from Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU and British National Corpus through statistics; then, four metaphorical extensions of SHANG/XIA and UP/DOWN are analyzed specifically to make up for deficiencies existing in the analysis of Lan Chun, which are STATE, QUANTITY, TIME and SOCIAL HIERARCHY; finally, differences and similarities of metaphorical extensions between SHANG/XIA and UP/DOWN are concluded in detail.Through this analysis, firstly, we will have a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of metaphorical extensions of SHANG/XIA and UP/DOWN; secondly, knowing similarities and differences in the cognitive models between Chinese and English through studying the metaphorical extensions of SHANG/XIA and UP/DOWN makes understanding and communication between two different cultures much easier; lastly, the study on the metaphorical extensions of SHANG/XIA and UP/DOWN forcefully pushes the further study on the other spatial concepts.