A Comparative Study Of Metaphor Of Li/Wai And In/Out

Since the1980s, the status of cognitive semantics in the linguistics research wasgradually improved, and gradually become the main content of the cognitive linguistics,the core content of it is to study the relationship between words and concepts. At present,the focus of cognitive semantics research is the relationship between language andconcept of space. Because the basic semantic function of Chinese direction words is toexpress the spatial relations. The mean of direction words can expand to other abstractdomain from the concrete domain through the way of metaphor and metonymy. In orderto find out the proto-sense and the metaphorical semantic domains of the modern Chinesedirection words Li and Wai and English preposition IN and OUT. This paper uses thetheory of metaphor and image schema theory.In this paper, the introduction part mainly discusses the literature review of homeand abroad about Li/Wai and IN/OUT. Meanwhile, it will briefly explain themethodology and the sources of corpus.Chapter one, this paper will investigate the proto-sense and the metaphoricalsemantic domains of the Chinese direction words Li and the English preposition IN.From the analysis of corpus, Li and IN can express three proto-senses: static relations,dynamic process from outside to inside and containing the results. Li also expands five:abstract domains: situation, scope, social relation, time and quantity, and IN also expandssix abstract domains: state, scope, time, manner, quantity. This chapter will compare thedistributions of these two words.Chapter two, this paper will investigate the proto-sense and the metaphoricalsemantic domains of the Chinese direction words Wai and the English preposition OUT.From the analysis of corpus, Wai and OUT can express three proto-senses: static excluderelations, dynamic process from inside to outside and results of excluding. Wai also canexpand three abstract domains: number, scope, and social relationship, and OUT also canextend six abstract domains: state, result, logical relation, range, quantity and time. Thischapter will compare the distributions of these two words.The third chapter analyses the reason of the results of the former two chapters, and tries to find out the cause of the asymmetric distribution of Li/Wai and IN/OUT. Thischapter gives the brief explanation of the cognitive factor, cultural factor and the way ofthinking factor.The last part will summarize the main content of this paper, I hope this study canoffer help to the learners of English and Chinese.