A Comparative Study On Metaphors Of Heart In Shakespeare's And Cao Yu's Plays And Their Translations:A Conceptual Blending Perspective

The metaphorization of the basic body-part terms is one of the significant means of humans' forming and expressing concepts.As a vital organ and key vocabulary in English and Chinese,the heart tends to be easily conceptualized and then abounds with metaphorical meanings,worthy to be explored.A reading of Shakespeare's and Cao's plays shows quite a few metaphors in these plays are connected with the body-part term heart,and that metaphorical expressions related to heart also render these plays'languages more expressive.What is particularly noteworthy is that metaphor though a rhetorical figure,is by its nature an approach in human thought and cognition.Fortunately,conceptual blending,as a general and ubiquitous cognitive manipulation,can adequately account for the process of meaning construction and reasoning mechanism in metaphorical phenomena.Notice that translation itself can also be understood as a metaphorical process.As such,conceptual blending is also quite applicable to the process of metaphor translation.Above all,with the application of Conceptual Blending Theory,this thesis attempts to comparatively explore metaphors of the body-part term heart in plays of Shakespeare and Cao Yu and to propose appropriate and effective translation strategies of heart metaphors.Through a selection of the body-part term heart related in Shakespeare's four tragedies(King Lear,Hamlet,Othello and Macbeth)and Cao's Thunderstorm and Sunrise as the corpus,this thesis first analyzes heart metaphors in the rhetorical view,and finds that rhetorical device serves as a crucial stage of the cognition of heart metaphors.And then,on the basis of previous cognitive classifications of metaphor and the analysis of metaphorical expressions related with the body-part term heart in above plays,it constructs three shared cognitive models of heart metaphors(i.e.heart as substance and entity,as container(container for emotion and for thought),as organism),and their own distinct metaphorical models,and then applies Conceptual Blending Theory(CBT)to the cognitive interpretation of the above models as to explore the cognitive mechanism of meaning construction of heart metaphors,finding that CBT can adequately account for the process of dynamic meaning construction of heart metaphors,and that the relation concerning the cognition of heart metaphors in these plays is mainly characterized by"co-existence between similarities and differences" and "more or less the same".That is,concerning the metaphorical cognition of heart,there are common rules by virtue of the similar bodily experience between English and Chinese;while due to differences between English and Chinese linguistic systems,there are their own distrinct metaphorical models.Finally,with reference to the metaphor translation model based on the framework of CBT,it analyzes how translators approach translation issues of heart metaphors by means of comparing current representative translated versions,which indicates that there are three main translation strategies adopted,namely,total-and semi-correspondence projection strategies(source text space projection and translator projection)and non-correspondence projection strategy.And the first and third translating methods tend to be frequently employed to translations of heart metaphors in Shakespeare's and Cao's plays,respectively;the usage frequency of the second one is quite similar in both of them.It is hoped that this study could make contributions to a new perspective for the research on metaphors of body-part terms and their translations in plays of Shakespeare and Cao Yu.