Metaphors Of Chinese Orientational Nouns "Qian" And "Hou"

Metaphor has always been a hot spot of many scholars. Recent years, theresearch of metaphor in cognitive linguistics has been paid lots of attention. Theessence of metaphor is to understand and experience a kind of objects in terms ofanother, which not only influence our languages but also conduct our thinking andacting. As one of three kinds of metaphor, orientational metaphor is mapping theabstract concepts to orientational concepts, to make it a better understanding.According to the daily usage of Chinese orientational words, we find that“shang/xia （上/下)”、“qian/hou(前/后)” own the highest frequency in Chinese.However, no matter from pragmatic perspective or cognitive perspective, the study of“shang/xia（上/下)” is far more than the study of “qian/hou(前/后)”. Further more, thearticles that systematically discusses “qian/hou(前/后)” from metaphor angle are few.On this occasion, this article is trying to study the metaphor of Chinese orientationalwords “qian/hou(前/后)” by applying the theory of orientational metaphor, presenttheir metaphor expressions, reveal its metaphor principles of how they map from spaceto time、state、social hierarchy and other domains, and explore the inner mechanism of“qian/hou(前/后)” metaphors.According to collecting and selecting the data from CCL、 online corpus、Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, we gathered mass of materials of “qian/hou(前/后)” metaphors. Through the analysis on data, we find that, metaphors of “前/后(qian/hou)” are mainly in three domains: time、state and social hierarchy. The forms ofexpressions are: PAST IS “QIAN”, FUTURE IS “HOU”; FUTURE IS “QIAN”, PASTIS “HOU”; NOW IS “QIAN”; HIGHER POSITION IS “QIAN”, LOWER POSITIONIS “HOU”; ADVANCED IS “QIAN”, DISAPPOINTING IS “HOU”; OUTWARDIS“QIAN”, INWARD AND SECRETARY IS “HOU”; BRAVE IS “QIAN”, TIMID IS“HOU”; and FRONTLINE IS “QIAN”, BASE IS “HOU”. From those we conclude that,“qian/hou(前/后)” has a complete orientational metaphor system, and their metaphorsare based on the physical experience of humans、 cultural background and socialbehaviors. What’s more, the metaphors are coherent with our cultural values.