Contrastive Analysis Of Conceptual Metaphor In Wind Metaphor Between Chinese And English

Abstract:Metaphor is an important way for people to recognize the world, and it is also a special tool of our mind. Metaphor is based on the people’s recurring experience. The way of people to recognize the world by metaphor is just like the mode that is "recognize-metaphor-recognize". First of all, people need to understand the concepts which are easy to be felt. And then, with the help of metaphor, people use the familiar experience to recognize the new concepts. In recent years, with the development of modern study of metaphor, there have been massive researches on body metaphor. And in the same time we find that there is a lack of the researches on natural things, which we can do many researches on it. In this paper, we applied the theory of conceptual metaphor, through summing up and sorting out the metaphor expressions on "wind" in both Chinese and English, searched for the similarities and differences, and then analyzed the reasons that caused the of similarities and differences from the factors in geographical environment, thinking modes, religious ethical and medical characters. The paper is composed with seven parts:The first part is an instruction of the research status and the significance of the study. And in this part we also state the metaphor theory and the development of the metaphor in both China and abroad.The second part introduces the character source of "Feng" in Chinese and "Wind" in English and sort out the word senses of "Feng" and "Wind" in dictionaries such as the Chinese Dictionary and Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and so on.The third part and the forth part introduces the similarities and differences of the metaphor expressions on "Feng" and "Wind" in Chinese and English based on the data from dictionaries and corpuses. The fifth part analyses the reasons about the similarities of the metaphor expressions between "Feng" and "Wind", including embodiment、systematicness and multi-dimension.The sixth part analyses the reasons about the differences of the metaphor expressions between "Feng" and "Wind", including geographical environment, thinking modes, religious ethical and medical characters.The last part is the conclusion of the whole study, explains the limitation of the thesis and proposes potential suggestions for the future research.