The Contrastive Study Of Love Metaphor In English And Chinese Songs

Love is regarded as a kind of highly complex abstract concept, since ancienttimes it has become a popular topic in literature, poetry and songs. Since the1980s,with the continuous development of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Chinese andforeign scholars have launched researches on the subjects related to ConceptualMetaphors. Love as an abstract concept is endowed with abundant connotationsthrough metaphor, and it also gradually catches the attention of the cognitivelinguistics scholars. But in general, the related researches is only a few. This thesis isbased on the Conceptual Metaphors, applying Chinese and English songs as theresearch objects and launching a thorough investigation on LOVE Metaphor, it aimsto discuss the similarities and distinctive features of LOVE Metaphors in English andChinese songs. The innovation of this thesis is to conduct a meticulous research fromthe perspective of cross-culture, specifically to summarize cultural connotationsreflected from LOVE Metaphor in Chinese and English songs.This thesis intends to answer the following three questions:(1)What similar cross-domain mappings exist in LOVE Metaphor in English andChinese songs?(2)What differences exist in LOVE Metaphor in English and Chinese songs?(3)What cultural connotations can be reflected from LOVE metaphor betweenEnglish and Chinese?This thesis is based on the internet, and English and Chinese songs are theresearch subjects. In many well-known music sites such as Baidu music, Coolwomusic, Sogou music, typing "爱/LOVE" as the keyword to establish the corpus in order to detailed analyze the commonalities and differences presented in English andChinese love songs. In this study, it is apparent that there are many similarities inEnglish and Chinese LOVE Metaphors. The Similarities can be divided into concretesource domain mapping to abstract love domain and the abstract source domainmapping to abstract love domain. For example, the similar mappings from the abstractsource domain to abstract love domain in English and Chinese songs are as follows:LOVE IS A JOURNEY, LOVE IS WAR, LOVE IS A LIQUID, LOVE IS PLANT,LOVE IS FIRE. And abstract source domain map to abstract love domain includes:LOVE IS INEQUALITY, LOVE IS MAGIC POWER and so on. Meanwhile, inChinese and English songs, there are also some distinctive features expressed inLOVE Metaphor. For example: LOVE IS THE SUN, LOVE IS A CONTRACT etc. InChinese there are LOVE IS MOON, LOVE IS FATE and so on.This thesis also analyzes and summarizes the similarities and differencesbetween Chinese and Western cultures. The differences are in the following areas:religion, philosophy, way of thinking, cultural character and national character. Basedon the above research and feasibility studies, this thesis provides a support andsupplement on LOVE Metaphor in the future, this thesis also has some referencevalue.