Emotion Metaphors Of Internal Body Organs In English And Chinese

The objective of the study is to examine the words of internal body organs in English and Chinese and analyze the conceptual metaphors of internal body organs in order to explore the universality and variation of conceptual metaphors. The words of internal body organs of analysis are guts, stomach in English and 肝(gan, liver), 胆(dan, gall), 肠(chang, gut), 胃(wei, stomach), 肚(du, belly), and 腹(fu, belly) in Chinese. The present study has two research questions:(1) the similarities and differences of conceptual metaphors of internal body organs in English and Chinese;(2) the universality and variations in metaphor and their causes. The previous studies examine the words from the perspectives of image schema, conceptual metaphor, semantic transfer, and cross-cultural analysis. But predecessors’ research on internal body organs related to human emotions is limited to a particular language, and the systematic research is still rare. Besides, the data of previous studies are derived from books, dictionaries, or self-built corpora, so that the single and unsystematic data can’t cover all the language types. In addition, the previous studies utilize the method of analysis, description, induction and comparison, therefore, the scientificity of the research method remains open to question.In the present study, 1000 citations of each word are retrieved randomly from Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) in English; 500 citations of each word are retrieved randomly from Contemporary Chinese Corpus in Chinese. The data are classified and analyzed with Metaphor Identification Procedures(MIP) and dictionaries to gain metaphorical expressions. The WordNet and SUMO method are utilized to obtain conceptual metaphors.The findings are as follows:(1) There are similarities and differences of conceptualizations of internal body organs in English and Chinese: five source domain concepts are used to describe human emotions and feelings in English, namely, OBJECT, OBJECT OF MANIPULATION, OBJECT OF MOTION, CONTAINER, and ANIMAL; while four source domain concepts are used to describe human emotions and feelings in Chinese, namely, OBJECT, MOTION, CONTAINER, and FOOD. The shared source domain concepts in English and Chinese are OBJECT and CONTAINER;(2) There’s no compound word for internal body organs in English, while the Chinese compounds are usually used to characterize emotions and feelings. Based on the findings, the author claims that:(1) The universality and variation of metaphor are the result of the interaction between embodiment and social-cultural cognition;(2) The causes of metaphor variation are as follows: differential experiences, differential cultures, and differential cognitive styles and preferences.The study further expounds the embodiment and culture basis of metaphor with the comparative study of emotion metaphors of internal body organs.