A Comparative Study On The Conceptual Metaphors Of Marriage In Chinese Style Divorce And Gone Girl

Counting from the age of Aristotle,the studies of metaphor have a long history of more than two thousand years.Metaphor never fails to be the hit topic among loads of linguists home and abroad.But before the conceptual metaphor theory was put forward,metaphor was always regarded as a type of rhetoric method by the majority of scholars.In the 1980 s,the publication of Metaphor We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson provided a cognitive perspective for metaphor studies.Cognitive linguistics proclaims that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon but also a critical tool and a way of thinking for people to recognize the world.Marriage has been considered as the most common social relationship in human society.Marriage is a multi-level and complicated concept.Some researchers try to analyze marriage from the perspective of law,while in the field of sociology or psychology.In order to express the abstract concept vividly and lively,people would like to apply metaphors to construct it.It is worthy noting that literary works containing numerous metaphors provide enough corpus for us to analyze them.Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and Wang Hailing's Chinese Style Divorce are novels choosing marriage as the topic and containing many marriage metaphors.Based on conceptual metaphor theory,this thesis compares marriage metaphors in the Gone Girl by American female writer Gillian Flynn with those in Chinese Style Divorce by Chinese female writer Wang Hailing,exploring the similarities and differences of the marriage metaphors between the American novel and Chinese novel.This thesis studies ordinary people's understanding to marriage and cognitive process.The author searches the two novels and collects all examples that contain marriage metaphors.With the 104 examples which are gathered,the author summarizes 11 conceptual metaphors such as MARRIAGE IS A WAR,MARRIAGE IS A JOURNEY,MARRIAGE IS A MACHINE and so on according to source domains of those metaphorical expressions.After the analysis of the mapping between the source domain and target domain in the two novels,the author finds that the two novels share most of conceptual metaphors of marriage.But some specific metaphorical expressions are distinct.The differences of marriage metaphors between the two novels are caused by the economic factors,historical factors,geographical environment,proverbs and allusions and traditional views towards wife.This study tries to interpret Chinese and American literary works in terms of conceptual metaphors theory,offering a new perspective for the appreciation of literature.Besides,this study involving disparate culture backgrounds can explore and analyze whether there are cognition patterns for marriage embedded in Americans and Chinese by the comparison of metaphors they used.This study can promote the intercultural communication and understanding between China and the United States.