A Corpus-based Study Of The Conceptual Metaphor In East Wind: West Wind

Pearl S.Buck,an American woman writer,was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for portraying stories concerning China.As her first novel,East Wind: West Wind marks the beginning of her efforts to achieve the exchange and integration of Eastern and Western cultures.Buck employs the first-person narrative of a Chinese heroine — Kwei-lan to narrate the changes she and her family undergo,which overturns the previous narrative pattern.The novel,with concise and vivid language,is enriched by plenty of metaphors to deepen the theme of the cultural integration between the East and the West.This thesis aims to explore the main features of the distribution of conceptual metaphors in East Wind: West Wind;the relationship between the source domain and the target domain in the above conceptual metaphors in the novel;factors influencing Pearl S.Buck's choice of metaphors.To conduct the study,this thesis is based on the conceptual metaphor theory raised by Lakoff and Johnson.Besides,owing to the corpus analysis tool Ant Conc3.2.4w,the author put the English text of East Wind: West Wind(54,090words)into it to establish a corpus and retrieve the metaphor-related words in sequence.Furthermore,to do a qualitative and quantitative study,Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit(MIPVU)proposed by Steen(2010)and authoritative English dictionary Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English are also utilized in this thesis.The research process and results show that:Firstly,structural metaphors,ontological metaphors and orientational metaphors occur in the novel to a different level.With the comparison of the three categories ofmetaphors,structural metaphors account for 66% among the total,followed by ontological metaphors with the proportion of 22.3% while the ratio of orientational metaphors is only about 11.7%.The distribution of conceptual metaphors in each chapter is quite uneven.Among them,metaphors in Chapter 2 are used with supreme frequency while the lowest in Chapter 12.Secondly,Buck tends to utilize plants(the la-may flowers,chrysanthemums,pine trees,plum trees,etc.),animals(dogs,snakes,golden orioles,etc.),flowing liquid(river,flood),human organs(human body,head)and other familiar concepts in our daily life as the source domains to construe the corresponding target domains on account of their common grounds.It is also found that the more complex and abstract the storyline and characters' psychological activity,the more conceptual metaphors are used and vice versa,which reflects the concise but flexible writing style of Pearl Buck.Thirdly,the factors that influence Pearl Buck's use of conceptual metaphors include both social and individual aspects.On the one hand,Buck has life experience in China during early years,so her choice of metaphor is based on a unique social context mode combining of China and western countries.On the other hand,Pearl Buck's rich and exquisite emotional world and her ambitious cross-cultural ideals constitute a distinctive cognitive style.This study is expected to enrich researches on Pearl Buck's works through combining conceptual metaphors with the corpus approach.Besides,it is also hoped to provide methodological references for scholars to conduct researches on Buck's other literary works.