A Comparative Study On Metaphorical Generation Mechanism Of Basic Emotions In English And Chinese

Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life.But for a long time,metaphor has only been viewed as a rhetorical device,which can be traced back to the time of Aristotle.He claimed that metaphor was merely a kind of rhetorical method used for ornamental purposes and it was a linguistic phenomenon only found in poetry.His ideas influenced many people's understanding of metaphor until the publication of Lakoff and Johnson's famous book Metaphors We Live By in 1980 which has totally changed people's views about metaphor.The publication of the book signals a new era of metaphor study.In the book,Lakoff and Johnson point out that metaphor is not just a common language phenomenon,but also a way of thinking.It is a cognitive tool people used to comprehend the surrounding world.According to Lakoff and Johnson,concepts are essential to us.They not only govern our thought,but also our everyday functioning.Therefore,they put forward “conceptual metaphor” theory which refers to the phenomenon that people understand one concept or idea in terms of another,so new information or a relatively abstract conceptual domain can be understood in terms of known information or a more concrete one.Emotion is a very important aspect of human experience.The study of human emotions constitutes an essential part of human cognition.But as a particular psychological state of feeling,emotion is so abstract and vague that it can't be clearly represented on its own.It is mainly expressed by metaphorical language.Metaphors play a very important role in the conceptualization of emotions,so the conceptual metaphor theory is often used as the theoretical framework to understand and analyze the emotional cognitive domain.Conceptual metaphors are used widely in our daily life.Researches display that more than seventy percent of the English expressions derive from conceptual metaphors,so they are also important and indispensable in our cognitive activities on human emotions.Conceptual metaphors allow people to conceptualize the abstract emotional concepts through more concrete ones and therefore make the difficult emotional cognitive domain easier to understand.However,emotions of humans are rich and diverse,they are not equally frequent and significant.Someemotions are considered to be more basic than others in that they tend to be universal and occur more frequently than others.According to the views hold by many psychologists that happiness,sadness,anger and fear are better examples of emotions and are considered to be more prototypical than others at the same horizontal level.Therefore,this thesis conducts a comparative analysis on the conceptual metaphors of the four basic emotions between English and Chinese from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,with the aim of exploring the similarities and differences between the two languages in the conceptualization of the basic emotions and finally constructing the metaphorical generation mechanism of the emotions in English and Chinese.The findings of the thesis are presented as follows:Firstly,English and Chinese share some major conceptual metaphors.Because the metaphors used to depict emotions are not arbitrary.They are deeply grounded in human bodily experiences.As all the human beings share some basic bodily experiences and common psychological cognitive system,they share some common conceptual metaphors in the conceptualization of emotions.Secondly,as we know,language is a product of culture,so different cultural models in different countries also lead to cross-cultural diversities in the conceptualization of emotions.Different living environments,different cultural values and the unique philosophical and medical views are factors mainly talked about in this thesis which may result in different conceptual metaphors.Finally,the metaphorical generation mechanism of each of the basic emotions is constructed.The conceptual metaphors here are grouped into five types: body metaphor,ontological metaphor,orientational metaphor,sensational metaphor and force metaphor.Thus people can know clearly about how human beings sense and express emotions.It is expected that the study on the four basic emotions can help people to form a general view on how metaphors are used in the conceptualization of emotions.People can know more about conceptual metaphors and therefore increase their metaphorical awareness.Also,it's hoped that the study can promote English teaching and learning,and provide some implications for translating practice as well as cross-cultural communication.