A Corpus-based Cognitive Study Of The Metaphorical And Metonymic Uses Of "Foot" In English And "Jiao" In Chinese

Conceptual metaphor theory is one of the fundamental theoretical frameworks in the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise. It is proposed by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980 together with conceptual metonymy. They are ubiquitous and are considered as two important tools human beings employ to cognize the outside world. Metaphor is conceived as a cross-domain mapping based on the similarity of two concepts, with the main function of understanding one thing in terms of another, while metonymy is conceived as an intra-domain mapping based on contiguity of two concepts, with a mainly referential function. Studies concerning the relationship between the two have been on the increase. A widely accepted agreement is that they are two poles on a continuum, with metonymy being more basic. Researchers have proposed many models to interpret the interaction between them, among which Goossens’model of metaphtonymy is a highly influential one.Experientialism holds that people understand the world on the basis of their own bodily experience. Therefore human body becomes a source of figurative language. In China, figurative studies of body parts include "head", "face", "heart", "mouth", "hand", etc. These studies have proved the pervasiveness of human figurative thought. In order to further reveal the relationship between metaphor and metonymy and to compare figurative thoughts of different cultures, we conducted a research of the human body part "foot" in English and Chinese. We sampled 1,000 citations of "foot" and its Chinese equivalent "jiao" from two corpora:the English corpus is the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Chinese corpus is the modern Chinese corpus of the Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU. Particularly, we use Goossens’ model of "metaphtonymy" to interpret the interaction of metaphor and metonymy. What we found are as follows:Firstly, a large portion of human language is figurative. The percentage of the non-literal uses of "foot" in the English data is 34.2%, while in the Chinese data it is 42.2%. Secondly, the percentage of foot metonymy in non-literal uses in English is as high as 74.56%, most of which have something to do with the action of "standing up". In the Chinese data, the percentage is moderate, and in most cases, foot is used together with hand to indicate people’s psychological features in certain states. Thirdly, there are more examples of metaphtonymy in the Chinese data, which is based on the fact that more metaphors are found in Chinese. This does not mean that metonymy is less important. On the contrary, this shows the more basic role played by metonymy. Fourthly, whether an expression is non-literal or not can only be decided by the context it occurs. What is literal in one context might become metaphorical in another, and vice versus. This supports the research method of employing corpus. Lastly, metaphor is culture-specific. Many metaphorical expressions are culture-loaded.