The Comparative Study Of Temporal Metaphors In Chinese And English

Metaphor is not only a rhetoric device but a way for thinking andcognition. The human understanding of the world is expressed by meansof metaphor. According to metaphors, human can know abstract things interms of concrete ones. The earliest researcher of metaphors should beAristotle. Following Aristotle’s view, scholars for a long time consideredmetaphor only as a figure of speech, a rhetorical device. In1980, thebook Metaphors We Live By, written by Lakoff and Johnson, broke a newpath for understanding of metaphors. Time is an abstract and intangibleconcept, so we must comprehend it by metaphors. There are mainly threetypes of metaphors, which are spatial metaphor, ontological metaphor andstructural metaphor due to different source domains. In the process ofusing metaphors, those metaphors are all considered as the source domain.Therefore, three temporal metaphors exist respectively. Those differenttemporal metaphors represent human’s understanding andconceptualization of different types of time.The present thesis attempts to further studies by giving a comparisonof temporal metaphor in English and Chinese. The findings show thatthere exist similarities as well as differences in Chinese and Englishtemporal metaphors. Through the thesis, we intend to understand thetemporal metaphors more deeply and widen the cognitive researches ofmetaphor. Finally, we are eager to apply the theories to the foreignlanguage and foreign-oriented teaching...