A Contrastive Study Of Human Body Idioms In English And Chinese－from The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

Metaphor, as a figure of speech, was familiar to people over2000years. Traditionally,metaphor is viewed as a kind of method to decorate and beautify language. With thedevelopment of cognitive metaphor, it is asserted that metaphor is cognitive in nature;metaphor is pervasive not only in people’s everyday language, but also in people’s thoughtand action. Thus, human being’s ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphoricalin nature. Therefore, metaphor is not merely a figure of speech, but also an importantcognitive tool and method to understand the world and construct the concept system.Especially, Conceptual Metaphor Theory is used a lot in people’s daily life. As the core ofmodern cognitive metaphor, and an important concept in cognitive linguistics, conceptualmetaphor allows us to understand a relatively complicated, abstract and invisible concept interms of a more familiar, concrete and visible concept. Moreover, the mapping model iswidely used in human thinking and behaving. In the past decades, a lot of researches ofmetaphor have been done, including the researches of conceptual metaphor by somecognitive linguists. But there has no systematic and overall research on the human bodyidioms from the conceptual metaphor’s perspective.Idioms research has a long history, and both English and Chinese scholars have madelots of achievements in this field. As an inseparable part in language, researches on idioms arealways pervasive. However, there are few studies which study the idioms from theperspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Therefore, this study tries to make a contrastiveanalysis of human body idioms in English and Chinese from the perspective of conceptualmetaphor, aiming at providing a cross—cultural interpretation on conceptual metaphor.There are five parts in the thesis. Chapter1is an introduction to the research objectives,purpose, significance and the framework of the thesis. Chapter2is the literature review onmetaphor researches. The theoretical basis, conceptual metaphor, are also included in this part.Chapter3and Chapter4are the main body of this thesis. In Chapter3, human body idioms areanalyzed in detail, including idioms concerning eyes, hand, heart, and etc. the In Chapter4, the author presents a contrastive study of conceptual metaphors in human body idioms inEnglish and Chinese. The author finds that there are both similarities and differences inconceptual metaphor of human body idioms in English and Chinese. Reasons accounting forthe similarities and differences are analyzed too in this part from cross—cultural aspect.Chapter5is the conclusion. Based on the previous study, the author draws the followingconclusion:(1) conceptual metaphor is popular in human body idioms in English and Chinese;(2) there are similarities as well as differences in human body idioms in English and Chinese;(3) similarities of the conceptual metaphors root in the similarities of human being’scognition model and life experience; differences result from divergence of different cultures.And the thesis’ significance,limitations as well as the suggestions in further study are alsopresented in conclusion.This thesis analyzes the similarities and differences of human body idioms in Englishand Chinese from the cognitive aspect, which has its special theoretical and practicalsignificance. Theoretically, the research validates the universality of conceptual metaphor,and provides the interpretation of idioms from a totally new perspective. Aractically, with thedevelopment of globalization, cross-cultural communication has gradually become themainstream of foreign language teaching and learning. Therefore, the contrastive research ofhuman body idioms will help English learners in China to facilitate their learning and bringsbenefit for cross—cultural translation and communication.