A Cognitive Comparison Of The Mechanisms Of Emotional Expressions Of Internal Body Organs Between English And Chinese

This research chooses "heart","stomach","gut" and "xin"("heart"),"dan"("gut"),"fei"("lung"),"chang"("intestines"),"gan"("liver")as the search word respectively in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and Centre for Chinese Linguistics PKU,with the first 500 entries of each word collected and their emotional expressions extracted to analyze their specific cognitive mechanism under the guidance of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Conceptual Metonymy Theory.This research deals with three questions.Firstly,what are the emotion-expressing mechanisms of English and Chinese internal body organs?Secondly,what are the similarities and differences between English and Chinese in terms of such mechanisms?Finally,what are the reasons for the above similarities and differences?The research findings are as follows.First,both English and Chinese emotional expressions are formed through the mechanism of metaphor and metonymy.Second,both English and Chinese organs can express emotions through metaphor based on similarity in the position of the organ,and through metonymy by taking the suffering and function of the organ as the reference point,but they differ in that Chinese metaphor can also be based on the similarity in relations between organs,and that Chinese hardly use the activity of the organ to stand for emotions.Third,cognitive universality and cultural relativity can account for such similarities and differences,and the cultural relativities refer to the different understandings of the functions of organs and the exclusive culture of traditional Chinese medicine.It is expected that such a study can shed some light on vocabulary learning and cross-cultural communication.