LOVE Metaphor In English And Chinese Poetry-Conceptual Metaphor Theoretical Perspective

Love is an eternal theme not only in literary works, but also in people’s ordinary life. It bears various meanings, from which this thesis chooses "the strong feeling and connection between male and female". This thesis establishes a closed corpus that collects 200 love poems and takes the LOVE metaphor as the research object. This thesis breaks the limitation of traditional literary and rhetorical view towards metaphor and uses the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) that belongs to Cognitive Linguistics to carry out a systematic analysis of the abstract concept LOVE. This research not only proves the validity of the CMT, but also offers a new perspective to study human emotions from the cognitive perspective.This thesis chooses 100 English love poems and 100 Chinese love poems as the research material and adopts the Metaphor Identification Procedure developed by Gerard Steen to make a systematic analysis of LOVE metaphors in English and Chinese poems, trying to discover the similar and different ways to conceptualize the LOVE concept. This thesis draws the conclusion through a thorough research:the LOVE metaphor is pervasive in both English and Chinese poems. There are 15 LOVE metaphors in English poems and 17 metaphors in English poems. English and Chinese poetry share 12 similar LOVE metaphors. There are 3 specific LOVE metaphors in English poems and 5 in Chinese poems. The frequency of every metaphor is recorded and the metaphors are arranged in the order of frequency. Because of the similar life experiences and universal nature of human beings, English and Chinese share the similar LOVE metaphors. The different LOVE metaphors result from different patterns of economic development and different culture patterns.The research object is LOVE metaphors in the poetry which is different from previous studies that take the ordinary utterances as the research materials. Poetic metaphor uses the mechanism of everyday metaphor, but it is more complicated and diverse. It goes beyond the ordinary metaphor. This thesis not only proves the universality and cultural diversity of metaphor, but also has some implications for studying metaphors in the poetry.