A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Tool Metaphors

Since the book of Metaphors We Live By was published in 1980 written by Lakoff and Johnson,metaphors have been regarded as a way of thinking about things,not just as a figure of speech in the literature texts.They hold that the metaphor actually is to perceive,understand,conceptualize and experience one kind of things by means of another,then the Conceptual Metaphor Theory is produced.By reviewing a number of studies,the author finds out that as the important part of ontological metaphors,tool metaphors are lack of relevant studies.Therefore,there is still space to study the tool metaphors.The tool words such as sieve,model,net,ruler are determined in this study by choosing the tool words which are ranked high frequency in daily life in A Thesaurus of Modern Chinese and Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases and retrieving the tool words in corpora.Through collecting a number of examples in corpora and dictionaries,this study aims to make a systematic analysis of similarities and differences of English and Chinese tool metaphors and tries to explore the underlying factors that lead to those similarities and differences.The findings of this study lie mainly in the following three aspects: 1)The similarity between English and Chinese tool metaphors lies in the fact that although English and Chinese tool concepts can be mapped onto concrete domains which are based on shape similarity and shape-function similarity,they are mainly mapped onto abstract domains such as standard domains,method domains,system domains,action domains,relation domains and negative situation domains while their difference lies in the fact that English and Chinese tool concepts are mapped onto different target domains,and some tool metaphors are unique to Chinese;2)the reason for the similarity between English and Chinese tool metaphors is principally due to the embodiment of language,while the underlying factors that lead to the difference are the different cultures and thinking models between Chinese and English;3)the mapping models of tool metaphors differ from those of other ontological metaphors such as the body-part metaphors,plant metaphors and animal metaphors,which principally depends on the different similarity between source domain and target domain in different types of ontological metaphors.This thesis,which is a systematic contrastive and cognitive study on English and Chinese tool metaphors,extends the research of ontological metaphors into the tool domains.Furthermore,this study can help the two nations to understand the similarities and differences of English and Chinese tool metaphors so as to benefit the cross-cultural communication and shed some light on foreign language teaching.