A Comparative Study Of The STRAIGHT Image Schema And Its Metaphorical Extensions Between English And Chinese

Cognitive linguistics holds that image schema and metaphor are major ideal cognitive models for meaning extension. As a recurring, dynamic pattern of human mental process, image schema gives human cognitive ability to predict and reason.Image schema provides concrete foundation for metaphor mapping. Human can understand abstract concept in terms of the mapping result. Image schema study plays an important role in further researches on human cognitive mechanism and conceptualization.In 1998, Cienki proposed a spatial image schema, STRAIGHT. Inspired by Cienki’s research, we studied STRAIGHT image schema and its metaphorical extensions in English and Chinese. The study selected words with STRAIGHT concept, i.e. zhi and straight, as research objects, collected relevant linguistic data from online Chinese Corpus powered by Peking University Center for Chinese Linguistics and Corpus of Contemporary American, then analyzed the STRAIGHT schema in English and Chinese from the cross-cultural perspective. The study explained the experiential basis and meaning extension mechanism of STRAIGHT image schema, explored the universality and dissimilarity of human cognitive mechanism, and found the cultural and philosophical differences behind them.Through a detailed comparative study between English and Chinese, the findings of the study include:Firstly, based on similar bodily experiences Chinese and English people shared the same prototypical image schema of STRAIGHT. Besides, they also shared some same variants of STRAIGHT image schema, such as the STRAIGHT-PATH schema,the STRAIGHT-OBJECT schema, and the STRAIGHT-LINK schema. Apart from these schemas, Chinese people form a unique STRAIGHT-SCALE schema.Secondly, the major findings include:(a) the ratio of metaphorical usage of zhi in Chinese is higher than that of straight in English. The percentage of zhi found with metaphorical extensions is 93.45% of all Chinese data, while straight with metaphorical extensions made up 58.42% of the English corpus;(b) the source domain STRAIGHT maps onto five same target domains in both languages: TRUTH,MORALITY, DISCOURSE, TIME and EVENTS;(c) straight enjoys a wider metaphorical extension than zhi. Zhi extends into RELATION domain and INTUISION domain, while straight into CONVENTIONALITY domain, CONTROL domain, HOMOGENITY domain, CHOICE domain, and LAW domain.The study further expanded and enriched Cienki’s research on STRAIGHT schema. It proves the fact that there are universal conceptual metaphors in different languages and cultures, and that there are the differences in conceptualization of abstract concepts from the linguistic perspective. This research, however, has some deficiencies, such as the limited quantity of the linguistic data reflected STRAIGHT image schema, and the subjectivity in the classification of metaphors. The research methodology and findings may provide references for similar linguistic researches.