A Cultural Cognitive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors For Children In Chinese And English

The claim of the philosophical position of experientialism and embodied realism provides fundamental assumption for cognitive views of metaphor. In this view, metaphor is regarded as a cognitive or conceptual organization largely manifested through linguistic expressions. It contains a set of systemic mappings which are deeply rooted in human embodied experience. However, what is cognitive and embodied is essentially cultural, so more scholars start to consider how cultural and social factors shape human understanding of their embodied experience and the conceptual metaphors which are based on the experience. On the basis of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, K?vecses makes a social-cultural extension of metaphor by focusing on the universality and variation of metaphor in culture. Metaphors, therefore, as culturally specific mental structures of the world are simultaneously cognitive and cultural.The concept CHILDREN denotes a group of human beings who are below the age of 18 and who are relative to adults. We have found that the process of human thinking and talking about children is largely metaphoric, which is manifested through a large quantity of metaphorical linguistic expressions in their conventionalized discourse system. In fact, these metaphors reflect particular views on children, i.e. social construction of children according to certain expectations and needs of adults’ society. Children are empirically recognized and acknowledged as human beings essentially separated from adults by their immaturity and growing potential. How adults view the two distinct features of children constitutes a large part of their views on them.This thesis attempts to conduct a comparative and corpus-based research on these metaphorical structures of the concept CHILDREN in Chinese and English. The following three questions are expected to be concerned:(i) How can the concept CHILDREN be structured via concepts in other conceptual domains?(ii) What are the universality and variation between metaphors for children in Chinese and English conventionalized discourses?(iii) How can the universality and variation be explained from the cultural cognitive perspective?For the three questions above, we have the following findings:(i) It is a set of detailed mappings between the source domain and the target domain CHILDREN that play a constitutive role in the metaphorical construction of our understanding of children. By investigation, we generalize six shared conceptual metaphors for children at generic level both salient in Chinese and English. Besides, we identify some cross-cultural variations of metaphors at generic level as well as at specific level of particular elaborations of conceptual metaphor for children.(ii) With respect to interpretations of the cross-cultural universality, we find that the similar prototypical cognitive model for children based on human empirical facts motivates potential for universal metaphorical structures on children. In addition, the shared embodied experience of the source domains are conductive to explaining cross-cultural universality of metaphors for children.(iii) Differential experience and differential cognitive preferences jointly result in the cross-cultural variations. Especially, different cultural models for children highlight different aspects of the prototypical cognitive model, leading to different salience of conceptual metaphors for children. Different cognitive and cultural models for particular concepts in source domains explain variations in elaborations or instantiations realizing a same generic-level conceptual metaphor for children.Comparative analysis of metaphors for children in Chinese and English is helpful in exploring the metaphorical construction of the concept CHILDREN as well as its internal relation with human embodied experience and social-cultural value orientations. Besides, it promotes a reflection of conventional views on children so as to construct more scientific views on them in the future. In-depth study of cross-cultural metaphors for children from cultural cognitive perspective would also lead to a further exploration on the universality and variation of other cross-cultural metaphors in relation to human cognition and culture.