The Embodied And Cultural Origins Of Similarities And Differences In Disease Metaphors Between English And Chinese

Metaphor is not merely a figure of language, but also a matter of cognition, which serves as a fundamental cognitive style for people to perceive the objective world rooted in language, thought and culture. From the outset of life, diseases become a kingdom that we have to enter. As time goes by, diseases turn into hot issues from the bodily illness to complex images related to society, moral and humanity, countless disease metaphors would be on the lips of everyone. Therefore, the fusion of disease metaphors and cognitive metaphor study is an overwhelming research topic.Based on the previous studies on disease metaphors,the author firstly intends to extract disease conceptual metaphors from a myriad of disease discourses,which are primarily selected from the corpora BNC(British National Corpus)and CCL(北京大学中国语言学研究中心),People’s Daily Online(人民网)and some newspapers.In light of Conceptual Metaphor Theory,the purpose of this thesis is to provide the readers with a plain understanding of disease conceptual metaphors.Furthermore,the comparative research of disease metaphors is to facilitate readers to construe the similarities and differences between English and Chinese,as well as the latent embodied motivations and cultural origins.The findings of this research manifest that the similarities and differences of disease metaphors are coexistent in English and Chinese,and both of them are grounded on cognitive universality and respective cultural variations,such as DISEASE IS ENEMY,DISEASE IS DOWN,DISEASE IS NATURAL DISASTER and DISEASE IS COLOR.In addition,the development of disease metaphors is more distinctive in Chinese than that of English.Especially the case that diseases are taken as the source domain to construct every aspect of society is apparent,such as享乐病(extreme addiction of pleasure),�'癌(laziness cancer),社会�'瘤(social tumor)and so forth.However,the materials in English are limited.Accordingly, the comparative study of disease metaphors is beneficial for readers to realize the cognitive model and cultural properties hidden behind the language, and enlighten the cultivation of students’ metaphorical competence in the course of Chinese-English teaching and cross-cultural communication.