A Corpus-based Comparative Study Of Orientational Metaphors "Up" And "Down" Between English And Chinese

Orientational metaphors are rather common and significant in all kinds of metaphors. It plays a large role in our daily life. Space is the most basic concept for human beings. Many abstract concepts of human beings are constructed in terms of the spatial relations. Orientational metaphors are formed by mapping some spatial relationships onto the non-spatial relationships.Spatial category, one of the most basic categories in human thought, originates from the spatial categorization which segments the spaces we perceive, and categorizes the spatial features of objects and their positional relations in different cognitive processes. Spatial categories are closely tied to orientational metaphors. Based on the process of conceptualization of orientational metaphors, the spatial category theory generalizes perceptual knowledge we obtain from the endless objective world into systematic and rational knowledge of the limited categories, by which way we are able to find the relations of different objects. On the other hand, the mapping principle is significant to the study of orientational metaphors. The mechanism of metaphor works due to the relevance between two different domains. Orientational metaphors operate through the mechanism of image schema which functions to map the space concept (acts as the source domain) onto the abstract target domain. During this course, the space image and its internal logic are transferred to the target domain. Among orientational metaphors, "up" and "down" metaphors are the most basic ones.A large amount of data of relevant orientational metaphors is collected from Metalude and CCLPKU to build a corpus which works as the base of my study of oritational metaphors in this thesis by studying the relevant oritational metaphors. Through this paper, we will grasp the distribution of orientational metaphors in different domains, which helps us better comprehend the characters and effects of "up" and "down" metaphors in a scientific method. It further reveals the cultural similarities and individualities of "up" and "down" metaphors in the east and west.