| Lakoff and Johnson put forth the conceptual metaphor theory in1980s, which pulledmetaphor study out of the traditional rhetorical research and proposed that metaphor underliesour thinking patterns and daily behavior. The paper choose16episodes of the dating TVshows in2012, with8Chinese episodes of “If You Are the One” and8American episodes of“Take Me Out”, and two corpus are established as the basis of the contrastive analysis. Steen’sfive-step of metaphor identification is adopted to identify and categorize the conceptualmetaphor in the two dating TV shows. Then the author made a contrastive analysis betweenChinese and American dating TV show and analyzed the reasons of selecting the same anddifferent conceptual metaphors in the two dating TV shows.By analyzing the two dating TV shows, the results are found: Firstly, eight differentcategories of conceptual metaphors are found in Chinese dating TV shows and seven inAmerican dating TV shows. Five categories of the conceptual metaphors are found both inChinese and American dating TV shows. Secondly, there are three functions of the conceptualmetaphor in the dating TV shows: simplification, persuasion, and filter. Thirdly, the paperexplores the underlying reasons which can explain why there are similarities anddissimilarities of the conceptual metaphors used in the two dating TV shows. Life experienceand mode of thinking are the main reasons for similarities of the conceptual metaphorsbetween Chinese dating TV show and American dating TV show. And cultural base, socialenvironment, ideology of different nation and the situation of the honored guests can alsoaccount for the dissimilarities of the conceptual metaphors in Chinese and American dating TV show. |
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