A Contrastive Study Of The Semantic Extensions Of Orientational Metaphors Between English And Chinese

In cognitive linguistics,metaphor is not only a language phenomenon but a thinking pattern to perceive the world.Lakoff(1980: 7-30)claims conceptual metaphor is the cross-domain mapping from the familiar,concrete source domain to the unfamiliar abstract target domain and it can be divided into three categories:orientational metaphors,ontological metaphors and structural metaphors.Focusing on orientational metaphors,the author makes a comparative study within the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics,mainly aiming to work out the metaphorical extensions between English UP/DOWN and its Chinese counterpart SHANG/XIA.Firstly,by studying the spatial location,it can be found that the spatial meanings of UP and DOWN are most close to the spatial meanings of Chinese SHANG/XIA.Remarkable similarities and differences of the metaphorical extensions in Chinese SHANG/XIA and English UP/DOWN can be detected in this study.Moreover,the four concrete spatial concepts SHANG,XIA and UP,DOWN all can be mapped onto the following seven abstract target domains: QUANTITY,SOCIAL STATUS,TIME,SCOPE,STATE,EXTENT and HORIZONTAL LOACATIONS.However,the present study also shows there exist some different metaphorical extensions in the target domains of TIME,STATE and EXTENT.The author attempts to give some reasons for the similarities and differences found in this study from the aspects of cognition,cultural factors and linguistic features.The major findings of this study can contribute to a deeper contrastive study of metaphorical extensions of English and Chinese locative terms.Last but not least,this study can cast light on E-C or C-E teaching,learning and translation to some degree.