Linguistic Features Of Speech Organ Metaphors

Metaphor and language are closely related. Human body experience plays a significant role in the process of conceptualization and language understanding. Consequently, metaphors of human body organs are always regarded as hot topics in the research of conceptual metaphors. Moreover, metaphors of speech organs are systematic and many scholars take them as research objects. However, most studies employ the descriptive, inductive as well as introspective methods, which are not objective and systematic in metaphor identification. Some studies even do not employ the corpus-based approach in data collection.The study is a corpus-based cross-linguistic one, examining the English speech organ words(lip, mouth, tongue and teeth) and their corresponding Chinese counterparts(唇(chun, lip), 口( kou, mouth), 嘴(zui, mouth), 舌(she, tongue), 牙(ya, teeth), and 齿(chi, teeth)). The author extracts 1000 citations for each word from the Corpus of Contemporary American(COCA) and Chinese Gigaword Corpus respectively, and sorts out the non-literal use for the data retrieved according to dictionaries. MIP and SUMO methods are used to look into the metaphorical patterns for the speech organs. Finally, the author observes metaphor-based expressions and idioms related to these speech organs, attempting to find out linguistic features of these expressions in English and Chinese. The author attempts to solve the following three problems:(1) What are metaphorical patterns of the speech organ words in English and Chinese?(2) What are the linguistic features of speech organ metaphors, especially the linguistic features of some idiomatic expressions?(3) What are differences of linguistic features between English and Chinese?The result shows that except for MOUTH AS A CONTAINER, most speech organs can be conceptualized as AN OBJECT. The conceptual metaphors of speech organs are not metaphors alone. Most metaphors are based on metonymies, which use the organ to represent its function speaking. In terms of linguistic features, most of the non-literal uses in these two languages are idiomatic expressions and they almost confirm to the familiar pieces familiarly arranged construction pattern. However, there are also some differences between English and Chinese. The most obvious difference is reflected in the configurations of constructions: English prefers v+n and pre+n patterns whereas Chinese prefers n+n and adj+n patterns. In addition, some metaphor-based idioms in these two languages embrace the delexicalisation phenomenon, and it is more obvious in English. Last but not the least, some idioms have variants, but variable slots are flexible in English than in Chinese. Nevertheless, speech organ words in Chinese are often combined together and constitute new compounds or phrases, which is rare in English. The linguistic differences of English and Chinese are motivated by both embodiment and cultural factors.