A Study Of Metaphorical Extensions Of "through" In English And "Tongguo" In Chinese

Metaphor has been studied all the time from the ancient times to the present.The earliest study of metaphor can be dated back to the time of Aristotle. It remains animportant subject of study in such fields as linguistics, anthropology, philosophy andpsychology. The birth of cognitive linguistics in the1980s provided a brand newperspective in the study of metaphor. Since Metaphors We Live By was published in1980, metaphor has been the focus of study both abroad and at home. Over the lastthirty years, the study of spatial metaphor has been one of the most active andproductive in the field of cognitive linguistics.Though there are lots of scholars who devote themselves to studying spatialmetaphor, most of them take spatial words as their object of study, for example,“up”,“down”,“shang”,“xia”,“li”,“wai”. There is very little research about “through” and“tongguo” so far. Most of the previous studies of “through” focus mainly on itspolysemy, using prototype theory. In previous studies of “tongguo”,grammaticalization has been the focus of attention. There is no comparative analysisof “through” and “tongguo” so far.Therefore, under the framework of cognitive linguistics, the thesis is designed asa comparative analysis of the spatial metaphor of English “through” and Chinese“tongguo”, aiming to expand the study of spatial metaphor in general and injectingnew vitality. The data used in the thesis are mainly collected from ten Englishdictionaries and three Chinese dictionaries. Through a detailed description of thespatial meanings of the English word “through” and the Chinese word “tongguo”, theauthor makes a qualitative analysis of their metaphorical extensions within theframework Image Schema Theory. A further comparision is also made between thetwo words in term of their spatial meanings and metaphorical meanings.