A Cultural Cognitive Study Of ICE And SNOW Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese And English

Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a literary figure of speech and a matter of language.The claim of the philosophical position of embodied realism and experientialism provides a basic assumption for the cognitive view of metaphor.Within cognitive linguistics,metaphor is not just an aspect of language but a specific mental mapping and a form of neural coactivation that influences a good deal of how people think,reason,and imagine in daily life.According to conceptual metaphor theory,conceptual metaphors bring two distant domains into correspondence with each other.One of the domains is typically more physical or concrete than the other.The correspondence is established for the purpose of understanding the more abstract in terms of the more concrete.The mappings between two domains are deeply grounded in human embodied experiences.What is embodied are essentially cultural,thus more scholars begin to consider how cultural and social factors affect human understanding of their embodied experience and the conceptual metaphors based on the experience.Weather,one of the important natural phenomena,closely related to people's everyday life,is often metaphorically employed as source domain to explain abstract concepts and describe various situations people face.The previous studies of weather metaphors tend to focus on the metaphorical uses of wind and rain.This thesis attempts to conduct a corpus-based and comparative research on the metaphorical structures of the concept ICE and SNOW in Chinese and English from the perspective of cognitive models and cultural models.The following two questions are expected to be concerned:(?)What are the similarities and differences between metaphors for ice and snow in Chinese and English?(?)How can the similarities and differences be explained from the cultural cognitive perspective?After identifying and analyzing the data collected from the on-line corpora and dictionaries,the major findings in this thesis are presented as follows:(?)The metaphorical construction and understanding of ice and snow are realized through a series of specific mappings between the source domain and target domain.After analyzing,we generalize four shared conceptual metaphors for ice and three for snow at generic level in English and Chinese.Besides,we also identify some cross-cultural differences of ice metaphors and snow metaphors both at generic and specific level with concrete elaboration.(?)With regard to interpretations of the cross-cultural universality,we find that the similar prototypical cognitive model for ice and snow based on human empirical facts stimulates potential for universal metaphorical structures on ice and snow(?)Differential experience and differential cognitive preferences jointly lead to cross-cultural variations.In particular,different cultural models for ice and snow highlight different aspects of the prototypical cognitive model,resulting in different salience of conceptual metaphors for ice and snow.Different cognitive and cultural models for particular concepts in source domains explain variations in elaboration or instantiations realizing a same generic-level conceptual metaphor for ice and snow.Comparative analysis of metaphors for ice and snow in Chinese and English is helpful in exploring the metaphorical construction of the concept ICE and SNOW as well as its internal relation with human embodied experience.It also suggests that the similarities and differences of ICE and SNOW metaphors between English and Chinese come out of cognitive models and cultural variations,which sheds light on cross-cultural communication.