Body Metaphors In The Chinese Four-character Idioms

With the rise of cognitive linguistics three decades ago, scholars have conducted alot of studies on metaphors. Among the many studies, body metaphor has attractedprofound attention from cognitive linguists and researchers, but studies that combinebody metaphors and the Chinese idioms are relatively few. In view of this and topartially fill in this research gap, this thesis approaches body metaphors in the Chineseidioms by employing the conceptual metaphor theory. It analyzes the patterns of bodymetaphors in the Chinese four-character idioms, and shows how human beings,through metaphorical mapping, use their knowledge and cognition of their body toreach the cognition of the outside world.Based on the data collected from Chinese Idioms Dictionary, this thesis dividesthe mapping models of body metaphors in the Chinese idioms into four types, whichare: the body as the source domain; the body as the target domain; the body as both thesource and target domains; and mapping from the relationship between different bodyparts to the relationship between things or persons. This thesis shows that theformation of idioms on “human body parts” is not arbitrary but instead motivated byconceptual metaphor.The functions of the Chinese idioms containing body metaphors are also analyzedin this thesis. The functions are discussed from three perspectives, namely, thecognitive perspective, the linguistic perspective, and the social-cultural perspective.This thesis proves that the explanative power of cognitive metaphor in the study ofChinese four-character idioms and the mapping models suggested have implicationsfor the understanding and further study of Chinese idioms involving body metaphors;the idioms collected also provide useful data for future study on body metaphors andthe Chinese idioms.