| Metaphor is ubiquitous in life, which has been a hot topic for linguistic studies. Linguistic researches on metaphor have been fruitful. Although recent studies of metaphor have touched on many cognitive domains, these domains are confined to humans and various levels of the society. Thus, studies of basic cognitive domains of nature, for example, the Five Elements in nature, have been overlooked. The Five Elements in Chinese culture—metal, wood, water, fire and earth are the basic substances constructing nature. The Five-element Culture is rooted in the thinking mode of Chinese, and such cultural awareness has accordingly reflected in the Chinese language. As one of the Five Elements, METAL possesses numerous metaphorical expressions. However, studies of METAL from the linguistic and literary perspective are limited in terms of quantity, and researches from cognitive metaphorical perspective are even fewer.Based upon The Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the thesis carries out a research on metaphorical expressions collected from The Corpus of Modern Chinese by The National Language Committee and the on-line corpus designed by Center for Chinese Linguistics Peking University(PKU-CCLC) with the aim of generalizing the major metaphorical extensions and conceptual metaphors of METAL and analyzing their experiential bases as well as concluding the interaction among the typical members of METAL(namely, GOLD, SILVER, COPPER and IRON).The thesis attempts to answer the following three questions:(1) What are the major metaphorical extensions and conceptual metaphors of METAL?(2) What are the experiential bases of these conceptual metaphors of METAL?(3) How do typical members of METAL—GOLD, SILVER, COPPER and IRON, interact with one another in each metaphorical extension?Through analysis, it has been found out that(1) there are six major metaphorical extensions of METAL: VALUE, HARDNESS, COLORS, SOUNDING OBJECTS, DICTION and SOCIAL STATUS, and the major conceptual metaphors are: WEALTH IS GOLD/SILVER/COPPER, VALUABLE OBJECTS ARE GOLD/SILVER, and INFERIOR OBJECTS ARE COPPER/IRON. DEFENSE IS GOLD/SILVER/ COPPER/IRON, CHARACTER IS GOLD/COPPER/IRON, PHYSIQUE IS GOLD/COPPER/IRON, STANDARD IS GOLD/IRON, FORCE IS IRON, WILL IS IRON, INVARIABLE THINGS ARE IRON, SECURE POSITIONS ARE IRON, STABLE RELATIONS ARE IRON, and CALLIGRAPHY IS SILVER/IRON. YELLOW IS GOLD, WHITE IS SILVER and BLACK IS IRON. SOUNDING OBJECTS ARE GOLD/COPPER. SPLENDID DICTION IS GOLD and FORCEFUL DICTION IS COPPER/IRON. SOCIAL STATUS IS GOLD/SILVER.(2) The experiential bases of these conceptual metaphors include physical and cultural experiences. Physical experiences mainly refer to people’s interaction with the physical properties of METAL, including the production, hardness, colors, the attribute of making sounds and the pleasantness. Cultural experiences are mainly the experiences of Chinese metal currency culture, Chinese calligraphy art, Chinese jewelry culture and Chinese ancient system of official seals.(3) In VALUE, interaction exists among GOLD, SILVER, COPPER and IRON: GOLD and SILVER promote each other in some expressions but in other expressions, GOLD restricts SILVER; both promotion and restriction are found between GOLD and COPPER; GOLD restricts IRON; SILVER both promotes and restricts COPPER; SILVER restricts IRON; COPEPR and IRON promote each other. In HARDNESS, GOLD and COPPER/IRON promote each other; SILVER and IRON promote each other; COPPER and IRON promote each other. In DICTION, only the promotion between COPPER and IRON is found. In SOCIAL STATUS, only the promotion between GOLD and SILVER is found.On the one hand, the research can make certain contributions to the metaphorical studies of Chinese, helping learners of Chinese understand and employ metaphors of METAL. On the other hand, through the study of Chinese metaphors, the thesis has generalized cultural characteristics of Chinese, providing rich materials for the inceasingly-popular overseas Chinese teaching. |
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