A Comparative Study Of Chinese And English Female Metaphors From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor Theory

The study of metaphor in linguistics circles at home and abroad is common,but there are relatively few studies on FEMALE metaphors.Most of researches on FEMALE metaphors are carried out from the perspective of literary.However,there are only several comparative researches on Chinese and English FEMALE metaphors conducted from the perspective of cognitive metaphor,and corpora are limited to poetry and proverbs.This research,based on corpus,uses conceptual metaphor theory to make a comparative analysis of Chinese and English FEMALE metaphors.The research questions are as follows:(1)What are the types of Chinese and English FEMALE metaphors?(2)What are similarities and differences between Chinese and English FEMALE metaphors?(3)What are the universality and variation between views on females embodied in Chinese and English FEMALE metaphors? The Chinese data mainly comes from Peking University Modern Chinese Corpus(Web Edition)called CCL for short,and the English data are mainly collected from American Contemporary English Corpus called COCA for short.In this thesis,a total of 1107 Chinese data and 1061 English data are collected.The findings of the study are as follows:(1)By analyzing these corpora,this thesis summarizes 24 categories of Chinese FEMALE metaphors and 25 categories of English FEMALE metaphors.(2)The similarities between the source domains of Chinese and English FEMALE metaphors are shown that: both share 10 types of source domains,among which ANIMAL,PLANT,OBJECT and FOOD account for a large proportion of all source domains.In addition,the same source domain maps onto the same target domain.The same target domain can have mappings of a plurality of source domains,in which ANIMAL,PLANT,OBJECT and FOOD serve as source domains,and so donon-living entities.The categories of source domains are very broad.The differences between them are presented that: Chinese source domains FOOD and SPIRIT are more frequent than those in English,and English source domains,STATE OF MATTER and NATURAL PHENOMENON,are more frequent than those of Chinese.Chinese and English FEMALE metaphors have some unique source domain types,such as TEA,RICE,TOFU,YIN in Chinese,and DEVIL and CHURCH in English.Besides,due to the different cultures of China and English-speaking countries,the FEMALE metaphors with the same concepts are mapped onto by different source domains,and the same source domain has different notions to map onto the target domain based on the different cognitive experiences of animals and plants.(3)Chinese and English FEMALE metaphors reflect same and different views on females in Chinese and English.The universality of Chinese and English views on females includes emphasis on females’ beauty,derogation of females’ value and promotion of gender inequality.The variation is shown that there are much more ideas that support females’ independence and affirm the importance of females in society in English FEMALE metaphors.