| Metaphor, since ancient time, has always been one of the major topics for scholars to study. Many scholars consider metaphor as a rhetorical device and they put forward quantity of rhetorical metaphor theories, among which the most influential ones are Comparison Theory which is put forward by Aristotle, the Substitution Theory from Quintilian and Interactive Theory from Richards. Since the publication of Metaphors We Live By, cognitive metaphor is accepted by more and more linguists. Lakoff and Johnson claim that metaphor is a cognitive way of understanding the world and constructing our concepts; metaphor is a thinking mode that uses one concept to understand another one. Conceptual metaphor, which exists in our mind, is a universal concept that generalizes from everyday linguistic expressions, such as “LIFE IS A JOURNEY”..Love, as a high abstract emotion, is an everlasting topic in human history. People have created lots of excellent love poems since ancient time. In this thesis, the author chooses love poems as objects to compare the two conceptual metaphor systems of love in Chinese and English poems. In her study, the author has found that there are similarities and differences between Chinese and English love metaphors. The similarities can be summarized as follow: 1. English and Chinese metaphor systems have common cognitive bases, namely, association and imagination which are used to build the relation between two concepts. 2. Though they are two different language systems, English and Chinese languages use the same concept systems, such as “plant”, “human body”, “journey”, “fire”, and “war” to understand love. The differences are: first, there are some conceptual metaphors only exist in English and some in Chinese. Second, under the same conceptual metaphors of love, Chinese people and English people will express love differently, that is to say, these two languages have differences in choosing objects to understand love. After the analysis, this thesis gets some conclusions: In English and Chinese communities, the conceptual metaphors of love, based on the similar bodily experience and life experience, are similar or same. However, influenced by the geography, philosophy, religion, and other cultural factors, the metaphors in the two communities have cultural variation.Through this thesis, we will firstly get a better understanding of how important metaphor is in constructing our abstract concepts. Secondly, we can know the similarities and differences of cognitive models in these two language systems which may offer some help for language teaching and culture exchange in the future. |
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