A Study Of Meaning Generation Mechanism Of Emotion Metaphor In English And Chinese Under Conceptual Integration Theory

Emotion is an important part of human experience which is abstract and difficult to express. However, emotion contains a wealth of conceptual contents, human’s cognition and emotion are influenced each other, the complexity of human cognition constitutes the complexity of human emotion. Human’s emotion is expressed by metaphor to a large extent. Furthermore, the study of emotion metaphor has been a hot topic of Chinese and Western scholars. These researches are mainly focused on the comparative analysis of one or several emotions, or with a linguistic theory analyses one or more emotions, such as conceptual metaphor theory, image schema analyses a certain emotion. Lakoff and Johnson believe that emotion metaphor is mainly related with the spatial orientation. Recently some scholars are studied emotion from diachronic and synchronic perspectives. This thesis applies the conceptual integration theory to explore the process of meaning formation of joy, anger, sadness, fear, love metaphor and the motivations of similarities and differences.Conceptual integration theory has great explanatory power. It reveals the process of meaning formation of emotion metaphor which lies in the mapping and blending of multiple mental spaces. The elements and abstract structures of two input spaces selectively project into blending space. In the blend space, through composition, completion and elaboration emergent structure produces, and the metaphorical meaning also emerged.According to the mapping relationship of two input spaces and different structures and contents of generic space, this thesis analyses the blending process from four aspects: analog blending, transformed blending, salience blending and logic blending. Based on integration networks and diagrams, the meaning of emotion metaphor arises clearly. The conception and meaning of emotion metaphor is rooted in the experience of body and objectivity world. The meaning construction of emotion metaphor and comparative analysis of five basic emotions help people better understand emotion metaphor such linguistic phenomena.This thesis has six chapters. Chapter1introduces the research background, the objectives and significance, methodology and general framework of the thesis. Chapter2and chapter3are literature review and theoretical framework. Chapter4analyzes the similarities and differences of emotion expressions between English and Chinese. Chapter5is the body part. According to conceptual integration theory analyses the selected examples and further analyses the motivations of similarities and differences of emotion metaphor from human experience and language. Chapter6summarizes the major findings, limitations and suggestions of the study. This thesis makes a systematic study of emotion metaphor hopes to have a certain contributions of further study.