A Cognitive Study Of Metaphors Of Plants In Chinese Five-Element Culture

Metaphor has been one of the hot topics in modern linguistics.Recent studies on metaphor have covered many cognitive domains on various levels of humans and the society,which have presented very valuable reference for us and laid a good foundation for our further research.But recent studies seldom involve studies on basic cognitive domains of nature.The Five Elements in Chinese culture—metal,wood,water,fire and earth are the basic substances constructing nature and they are considered to be the source domains in human cognition.The Five-element Culture,which is unique to Chinese,has already been rooted in people's daily life,especially in language and thinking patterns.As one of the Five Elements in nature,PLANTS possess numerous metaphorical expressions.However,we find very limited studies on metaphors of PLANTS in Chinese Five-element Culture.Based on Conceptual Metaphor Theory,this thesis studies the metaphorical expressions of the members of PLANTS in Chinese Five-element Culture(FLOWER,GRASS,TREE,WOOD),which are collected from The Corpus of Modern Chinese by The National Language committee,Chinese Balanced Corpus of Tsinghua University,Modern Chinese Balance Corpus.The thesis attempts to study the majormetaphorical extensions and the conceptual metaphors of PLANTS in Chinese Five-element Culture,and analyze the interaction among the extensions and the interaction between the members of PLANTS in each extension.The thesis will also explain the cognitive motivations of these metaphors.This thesis answers the following three questions:(1)What are the metaphorical extensions of PLANTS in Chinese Five-element Culture?(2)How do these metaphorical extensions interact with each other?How do the members of PLANTS interact with each other in each metaphorical extension?(3)What are the cognitive motivations for the formation of these metaphorical expressions?After analyzing the linguistic data,the author of this thesis arrives at the following findings:(1)There are seven metaphorical extensions of PLANTS in Chinese Five-element Culture: PEOPLE,CHARACTER,SOCIAL STATUS,CHARACTERISTIC,PLACE,EMOTION and LIFE PROCESS.(2)In the interaction among metaphorical extensions,PEOPLE promote LIFE PROCESS,SOCIAL STATUS,EMOTION and CHARATER respectively,but the rest four metaphorical extensions have no interaction among one another.The second pair falls in SOCIALSTATUS and PLACE.The former promotes the latter.In the interaction between the members in each metaphorical extension of PLANTS,only PEOPLE,SOCIAL STATUS,CHARACTERISTIC and EMOTION are involved.In extension to PEOPLE,FLOWER and GRASS promote each other in some expressions,while in some other expressions,they restrict each other.In extension to SOCIAL STATUS,TREE and WOOD promote each other.In extension to CHARACTERISTIC,FLOWER and GRASS promote each other;GRASS and TREE promote each other.In extension to EMOTION,FLOWER and GRASS restrict each other.(3)Some of the metaphorical expressions come from literary quotation,but some are based on bodily and cultural experiences.The former lies mainly in the experience of plant such as its color,shape,growing environment,smell,characteristics and so on.However,cultural experience contains headgear,brothel,painting,poetry and so on.On the one hand,this study makes contributions to the enrichment of studies on Chinese conceptual metaphors to some degree.On the other hand,the achievements of this thesis facilitate Chinese learners' better comprehension and application of metaphoric expressions of PLANTS in Chinese Five-element Culture.