| In the essence, metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon. Life, as a philosophical proposition and abstract concept, has obscure meaning, but can be externalized by metaphor. This paper makes a comparative study of "life" metaphor in Chinese and English, aiming at exploring the similarities and differences in understanding the life metaphor and then further researching the hidden outlook on life in "life" metaphors. It tries to answer the following three questions:1) what is the frequency of structural, orientational and ontological metaphor in "life" conceptual metaphors respectively in Chinese and English? What are the similarities and differences in the choice of source domain in "life" conceptual metaphors? 2) What factors can influence the choice of source domain in Chinese and English? 3) What kinds of life outlook can be reflected?With these three research questions in mind, based on Lakoff & Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory, this thesis adopt qualitative and quantitative methods to classify and analyze the collected "life" metaphorical expressions drawn from the corpus BYU-BNC and the PKU-CCL and then draws the following conclusions:1. As 325 samples got from CCL and 217 from BNC has been picked up, it is can be said that there are lots of "life" metaphorical expressions in Chinese and English, while "life" metaphors in Chinese are more pervasively used. The concrete rate of each kind of "life" metaphors is as follows:in terms of structural metaphor, there are 289 "??" metaphorical expressions in Chinese, taking up 88.92% of the total amount and 165 "life" metaphorical expressions in English, making up 76.04%; as for ontological metaphor, there are 36 "??" metaphorical expressions in Chinese, accounting for 11.02% and 38 "life" metaphorical expressions in English, taking up 17.51%; as to orientational metaphor, there are no"??" metaphorical expressions in Chinese and 14 "life" metaphorical expressions in English, making up 6.45%.2. Based on the data collected, altogether 37 "life" conceptual metaphors have been abstracted both in Chinese and English. Among the 37 source domains.19 of them are shared source domains between Chinese and English, the top five source domains in Chinese as follows:Journey, Art, Diet, Religion, War; while in English, the top five are as below:Business, Journey, Art, War, Game; 10 of them appear in Chinese alone,8 in English alone.3. Causes for the choice of similar source domains in Chinese and English include:same bodily experience, similar social-cultural context and common knowledge about world or living experience; Causes for different source domains selection include:different cognitive preferences, different cultural backgrounds (religion or philosophy), different social contexts and different historical background.4. The similar outlook on life reflected by 'life" conceptual metaphors in Chinese and English are mainly as follows:1) in life, there shall be clear and firm life goals and people should not drift along; 2) people must continue to enrich themselves and take the right strategy, in order to stand out in the arena of life; 3) in life, many rules should be observed. The different outlook on life reflected are mainly as below:in Chinese culture, the overall awareness and collectivism are more valued, while in English culture, much more optimistic yet materialistic life attitude prevails. |
PDF Full Text Request