| Metaphor was ever recognized as a rhetoric or ornamental device. Since1990s, metaphor has acquired a renewed recognition and entered into a new stage with the publication of Metaphors We Live By. With the rising of cognitive linguistics, metaphor is regarded as a necessary means in thinking and a common cognitive phenomenon. Metaphor is pervasive in language and thought. It functions as a cognitive tool that helps us better understand this world.In the view of cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor is to experience and understand one thing in terms of another. Conceptual metaphors exist in thought and action, while linguistic metaphors are derived from metaphorical concepts. The mapping from the source domain to the target domain hinges on the working mechanism in the conceptualization of metaphor, which is characterized by being systematic, asymmetric.Emotion is omnipresent and an important subject in cognitive linguistics. The relation between cognition and emotion is quite interactive. Although emotion is such a complicated and abstract concept, it can be conceptualized and well expressed in metaphor. Metaphor plays a vital role in conceptualizing emotions. Romantic love is seen as a unique emotion that is difficult to describe. Without metaphor, love would be notoriously difficult to pin down. This paper deals with love metaphors from the cognitive perspective. Due to the universality in human thought and action, there are similar expressions of love metaphors in the three languages, such as LOVE IS FIRE, LOVE IS UNITY, LOVE IS FLUID IN CONTAINER, and so on. However, influenced by different cultures, belief systems and patterns of production, the three languages have their specific ways to conceptualize love, such as LOVE IS VINEGAR in Chinese, LOVE IS NATURAL FORCE in English and LOVE IS FUNCTIONING MACHINE in German.In this thesis, the writer deals with cultural variation of love metaphors in English, Chinese and German. Some valuable findings and enlightenments have been obtained. There exists the same conceptual metaphor in two or more languages when we have gathered a certain number of expressions that illustrate it in those languages. If the expressions found are the same or very similar, then, the superior level, that is, the conceptual metaphor is equivalent, since they correspond to the conceptualization of reality. That is because all human beings are unique due to our different ways of getting accustomed to the environment we are raised in. However, nature has created us alike, this can be proved by the following three aspects:neuro-genetic similarity of human beings; physical and physiological similarity; the universality of our socio-cultural structure. These similarities suggest that we should normally have equal ability to cognize the external world. Thus, we can understand metaphors as well as see the connections between different linguistic expressions. Also in this paper, the three languages share some conceptual metaphors of love with drop of differences within each of them. As to the differences, we have found in the course of the research, they are preconditioned by the cultural peculiarities of the speakers of English, Chinese and German. No culture can be identical with another. Apart from that, historical development of the languages; different economic patterns, religious and philosophical systems; as well as the speakers’different ways of treating reality, are also some reasons to account for the differences in cognition. The findings we gathered will provide a valuable working mechanism in cognizing the world and realizing what you see, feel and hear. And it will be a functional research tool for further studies on conceptual metaphors and cognitive phenomena. |
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