A Comparative Study Of Chinese And English Tea Poems From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

Tea poetry is the perfect combination of tea and poetry of Chinese cultural treasure,and often expresses its profound charm with the help of metaphor.In modern researches,metaphor is no longer a simple rhetorical method,but also an effective strategy for constructing and interpreting poetry.Metaphor can display the poet's emotional experience and thinking process and construct the meaning of poetry.The poet takes the source domain image as the carrier,and through the mapping of the source domain chain and the target domain chain,the unity of form and content and the perfect delivery of images can be achieved.As one of the most representative elements of Chinese culture,the understanding of metaphor in related poetry is even more valuable.Therefore,this paper takes tea poems from the subject of tea culture as an example and with the help of the conceptual metaphor theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,this paper discusses the application of conceptual metaphor in ancient Chinese tea poetry to analyze and probe into the usage of various conceptual metaphors in tea poems so as to help readers better understand tea poems and at the same time the author hopes to contribute to the spread of tea culture.This paper is divided into six chapters.Chapter One briefly introduces the layout of the thesis,the significance of the study and the background of the study.Chapter Two reviews the former studies from three aspects: studies of metaphor in the west and China;studies of metaphors in poems;comparative studies of metaphors in Chinese and English poems.Chapter Three elaborates the theoretical framework of this study: Conceptual Metaphor Theory.It also introduces the categorizations of conceptual metaphor,the experiential foundation of CMT,the concept of source domain,target domain and mapping.Chapter Four presents the methodology of this thesis,which includes data collection and the procedures of research.Chapter Five discusses the research questions raised before by collecting and classifying metaphors in Chinese and English tea poems.They will be grouped according to their source domains and then compared with each other to find the similarities and differences between them.At last,the reasons behind these similarities and differences are analyzed.Chapter Six concludes thestudy and states the major findings and limitations of the thesis.