A Corpus-Based Study Of Chinese And English Sensory Verb Metaphor

Building upon the Embodied Cognition Theory,Lakoff and Johnson put forward the Conceptual Metaphor Theory in their book Metaphors We Live By.Since being published,metaphor became one of the hottest study topics in cognitive linguistics.Lakoff and Johnson believe that metaphors are not only a characteristic of language,but also a mode of human thought which pervade human daily life and influence thought and human behavior.Humans fundamentally understand the world through their organs' perception,and their thoughts and conceptions are derived from physiological experience rather than transcending experience or abstract signs.Hence linguists must study sensory verbs to gain a greater understanding of metaphors and the human cognitive system.Due to the majority of human experience resulting from visual,auditory and tactile senses,the author elected to focus only on these three perceptions,particularly the visual sense.In this thesis the author aims to seek out the metaphor formation mechanism of sensory verbs and determine the influences of metaphorical mechanisms on human languages and cognitive systems through comparing and analyzing Chinese and English sensory verbs.Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory,this thesis made a corpus-based study of English and Chinese sensory verb metaphors by employing the bottom-up analysis method of corpus linguistics.After analyzing and comparing English and Chinese sensory verbs,the author discovered that within the range of sensory verbs the cognitive system westerners and Chinese are similar;both of them understand the world on the basis of their daily experience.English and Chinese sensory verb metaphors are also mainly based on the human physiological experience,but only Chinese sensory verb metaphors have a close relationship with culture.Although some metaphor formations of English sensory verbs also have something to do with the culture,they are for the most part exceptions.A list pertaining to the literal and metaphorical meaning of English and Chinese sensory ver'bs will be given in the appendix to the thesis;this will make the study results more tenable and objective and contribute to the establishment of English and Chinese metaphor parallel corpus.