Critical Metaphor Analysis Of Emotional Idioms In Xinhua Idiom Dictionary

The study of metaphor can be traced back to Aristotle two thousand years ago, which can be divided into rhetorical study, semantic study and linguistic study from the view of research scope and research technique. Lakoff and Johnson publish Metaphor We Live By in 1980,which is very important in the cognitive research of metaphor. At the same time, their research achievements mark that the metaphor study develops from traditional aspect to cognitive aspect in the west. Charteris-Black proposes the term of Critical Metaphor Analysis in 2004. It is considered as a new method of Critical Discourse Analysis, and it provides a new analysis perspective for the metaphor research. Critical Metaphor Analysis offsets the deficiency of semantic study by the combination of cognitive linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, corpus analysis, pragmatics and linguistics studies.Most of the previous studies based on Critical Metaphor Analysis focus on political discourses, such as presidential addresses and government work report. There are a few metaphor researches which are about emotional idioms. Emotion is the most universal and important human experience that also interacts with cognitive psychology. Many emotional idioms are based on metaphor to express feeling better. It is worth noting that traditional research method focuses on the mapping mechanism and the meaning construction of emotional idioms. Researchers always reveal the similarities and differences of emotional idioms between Chinese emotional idioms and English emotional idioms without the discourse analysis.For these reasons, the emotional idioms in Xinhua Idiom Dictionary are analyzed with Critical Metaphor Analysis theory and Conceptual Metaphor theory in this paper. The sources of idioms are regarded as contexts to reveal the hidden ideology with the cultural factor and common recognition.There are six kinds of metaphors in this dictionary to express emotions, which are organ-related metaphor, orientational metaphor, temperature metaphor, color metaphor,container metaphor, plant and animal metaphor. This paper follows three steps to analyze the emotional idioms, which are metaphor identification, metaphor interpretation and metaphor explanation. It can not only explain the metaphor mechanism of emotional idioms, but also reveal the hidden ideologies with the cultural factor and common recognition, such as the function of arousing emotion, selecting information and evaluating. It is intended to supplement the semantic study of Conceptual Metaphor Analysis and it can extend the research scope of Critical Metaphor Analysis theory, too. It is also important for people to have the critical awareness when they are using and understanding the metaphors of emotional idioms in daily life.