Conceptual Metaphors Of Love In The Song Lyrics Of Mayday And Maroon 5

Love,one of the basic emotion,is an important part of human experience and it is difficult to conduct in-depth analysis because of its high level of abstraction.We can explore the process of the conceptualization of love emotion by analyzing the language expression related to love.With the deepening of people's understanding of metaphor and the continuous development of cognitive linguistics,metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon,but its essence is that people understand and experience another thing with one thing.Metaphor is a creative way of thinking and it is also a cognitive ability.It can not only describe the similarities between things,but also discover and create similarities between different things.Contemporary pop songs are an art form with immense popularity and they can guide the public's aesthetics.The song lyrics are the very creative form of language.This study employs the song lyrics of Mayday and Maroon 5 as corpus to analyze the main love metaphors,and then analyze their similarities and differences and explore their cognitive motivations.The author collects the examples of love metaphors from the song lyrics of the two bands and classifies conceptual metaphors according to the source domains of these metaphorical expressions.The research finds out that most of the conceptual metaphors of love in the song lyrics of Mayday and Maroon 5 are similar,which is due to human beings' similar cognitive modes,bodily experience and life experience.However,some of the love metaphors are different because they are affected by the religion,diet culture and the way of thinking.This study offers a new perspective to analyze the song lyrics of Chinese and American bands from the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor Theory.It can help us better understand the characteristics and the style of the lyrics of the two bands,and thus better understand the similarities and differences between Mayday and Maroon 5 song lyrics.And also the study has enriched the researches of emotion metaphor.