A Contrastive Study On Weather-As-Source Metaphors Between English And Chinese

Metaphor is considered to be a powerful cognitive tool. The conceptual metaphor theory claims that metaphor is based on human being’s bodily experiences and is pervasive in man’s daily life. As a basic natural phenomenon, weather is one of the basic human being’s bodily experiences and is closely related with human being’s life. When people use the conception of weather to understand other conceptions, weather-as-source metaphor is formed. It plays an important part in human being’s cognition about the world.Only a few studies have been made on weather-as-source metaphors and most of them are about the emotion target; some focus on the metaphorical mappings from some basic weather idioms including wind idioms, rain idioms, thunder idioms, cloud idioms and snow idioms to concepts of emotion, difficulty, speed, and disease; some others concentrate on the metaphorical uses of "wind" and "rain". But these studies contribute mostly to the metaphorical uses of some basic weather terms and neglect the metaphorical uses of many other weather terms and air temperature terms. Moreover, the target domains covered in these studies are not extensive and comprehensive enough. Since people have similar experience and feeling about weather, weather-as-source metaphors in English language and Chinese language will share many similarities. Meanwhile, there are also some differences in weather-as-source metaphors between the two languages because of different cultural backgrounds of the two different nations. This paper attempts to make a comparative study about the similarities and differences of weather-as-source metaphors between English and Chinese.On the basis of the data from the dictionaries, literature documents and the corpora, this thesis mainly employs the classification method and comparative analysis method as its research methods. Taking the conceptual metaphor theory of cognitive linguistics as its theory framework, this thesis conducts a contrastive study of the target domains of weather-as-source metaphors in English and Chinese. It concludes the universalities and peculiarities of weather-as-source metaphors in two languages and further analyzes the cultural causes. Through the contrastive analysis, this research has found that weather-as-source metaphors in two languages have a wide range of mappings. Weather-as-source metaphors in two languages not only have universalities but also have differences. And the differences reflect the cultural characteristics in each language. The findings of the research contribute to some degree to the teaching of vocabulary, writing and translation as well as cross-cultural communication.