A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese HAND Metaphors

The publication of the masterpiece Metaphors We Live By(1980) is a big break for metaphor studies from traditional rhetoric view. According to Lakoff &Johnson(1980: 5), metaphor is a way of thinking and cognition, and “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another”. Human beings tend to cognize the outside world by following the order from the near to the far, from the concrete to the abstract, and from the simple to the complicated, an order which decides that human cognition of the surroundings begins with and is based on human bodies. As one of the most important body parts, the word “hand” is often used as a source domain in forming and expressing concepts.On the basis of Lakoff and Johnson’s(1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory, this thesis makes a tentative contrastive analysis of the hand-related metaphorical expressions in English and Chinese so as to infer the similarities and differences between the two languages, and attempts to analyze the causes underlying such similarities and differences.There are totally six chapters: The first chapter as the introductory part deals with the research background, research method, research purpose and structure of the thesis. Chapter Two serves as the literature review while Chapter Three introduces the theoretical basis of conceptual metaphor. The three types of HAND metaphors are introduced in Chapter Four, including HAND metaphors as entities, HAND metaphors as orientations and HAND metaphors as containers. In Chapter Five, the underlying causes of the similarities and differences between English and Chinese HAND metaphors are analyzed. The last chapter serves as the conclusion part, where the author gives a summary of the whole study and points out the limitation as well as the directions for future research.Base on the contrastive analysis, the following tentative conclusion is made as follows: there are both similarities and differences between English and Chinese HAND metaphors. The similarities come from the human cognition of the world which is based on the common bodily experiences and the same physiological structures of human beings. While the differences are chiefly out of the different families of the two languages with different cultural backgrounds and natural environments.