A Contrastive Study Of Body Metaphor In English And Chinese

According to cognitive linguists, human mind is essentially metaphorical, andmetaphors exist everywhere in our daily lives. A large number of conventional expressionsin English and Chinese are associated with parts of the human body, most of which arebody metaphors. Because of the universality of human cognition, different ethnic groupstend to share the same body metaphors. But different cultural background may lead to thedifferent using habits concerning body parts. Nowadays, scholars at home and abroad havebeen conducting extensive researches on the issue and fruitful achievements have beenaccomplished.After examining amounts of children’s literatures quantitatively and qualitatively, it isfound that English and Chinese children’s fictions are rich in body metaphors. Yet, theyshow significant differences in using frequency and mapping domains. The two facets couldreflect the cognition and culture between the two nations to some degree. So they deservean in-depth research for a better understanding to guide the contrastive studies of literaturein English and Chinese. Hence the paper conducts the study based on two children’s fictions,aiming to discover the differences in the above two aspects and the corresponding causes.Through the analysis, it comes to the conclusion that the differences of using habit liein two facets. Firstly, it differs in the total using number. The English children’s fictionemploys half body metaphors as many as the Chinese one in total. Secondly, there issignificant difference in using frequency. Back metaphor ranks the top in English children’sfiction, while head metaphor tops the list in the Chinese one. By giving the detailed analysisto the back metaphor and the head metaphor respectively, it is found that their mappingdomains differ greatly both in numbers and contents. The mapping domains of the headmetaphor in English children’s fiction only account for a half of the Chinese one, while theback metaphor is just twice as much as the Chinese counterpart. Moreover, the contents ofmapping domains vary greatly. All the similarities can be attributed to the universality inhuman cognition while the differences to the uniqueness in cultural background andlanguage system.