A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Body Metaphors

It is the law of human cognition that People know the world from the easyto the complex, from the concrete to the abstract, from familiarthings to unfamiliar things. Because people are familiar with their bodiesand organs, they often name concrete and abstract concepts from other domainsafter their body parts according to the similarities of position and function ofhuman organs. Both in Chinese and English, there are a largenumber of body words, which is the foundation of metaphorization.Human physiological structure and experience are inevitably used to cognize theobjective world. Body metaphor is a way of describing andcomprehending the world. As a language phenomenon, Metaphor is an importantform of expression. Because expressions reflect the thinking pattern of cognition,language, thinking and metaphor are closely related. The essence of body metaphor isto use the body domain to explain other domains. At first people use their body as areference point to cognize the objective world, for it is the most direct way to knowthings and the world. Ancient people know about their body and use metaphoranalogizes things in the world, which reflects people’s interaction with the world. Thisarticle applies the relevant knowledge of cognitive linguistics to analyze human bodywords and idioms in Chinese and English and concludes that thereexist differences and similarities between the Chinese and Englishbody metaphor of human body, and reveal that reveal differentcultural psychology behind linguistic phenomenon as well as thereasons. This article uses "head, face, heart. foot. mouth" to carryout comparative study. Through comparative analysis, we know that there exist similarities and differences between Chinese and English body metaphor. What is incommon is that they have same physiological structure and cognitiveprocesses, both of them try to understand the world through body experience.Difference is the different nations use the metaphor in the deep cultural imprint.What is different is that Chinese and English body metaphor are influenced their ownculture. These differences are caused by many factors, such as cultural patterns,natural environment and so on. This article analyzes Chinese and English bodymetaphor from the regional, culture, thinking, moral conceptsperspectives and concludes that there exist different metaphoricalexpressions. In this paper, the research is of great help to humanbody words and idioms, and is of great importance in interculturalcommunication, vocabulary, translation, contrastive linguistics.