A Cross-cultural Study Of The Conceptual Metaphor Of Time

The 1970's was called the era of "metaphormania". During the period, metaphor was not only studied by linguists, but also inspired the great interest of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and etc. Among numerous achievements in research, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory put forward by George Lakoff has been attracting the most attention. The theory claims that metaphor is the basis of mankind's cognition, thought, experience, speech and behavior. It is the basic means by which we live. The nature of metaphor is to understand and experience one kind of subject matter through another kind. Metaphorical language is a surface manifestation of metaphorical thinking.Time, as a basic factor in people's life, due to its abstractness, has to be comprehended via metaphor. The thesis is based on George Lakoff's Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and tries to analyze the metaphorical expressions of time both in English and Chinese. It collects 110 English expressions and 70 Chinese expressions, which are classified into 8 categories - 8 conceptual metaphors are presented. The research shows that the metaphorical representation of time is a systematic structure. And the English and Chinese cultures share the similarity in conceptual metaphors of time. The highly abstract concept - time serves as the "target" domain can be understood through the "source" domains of "moving entity", "space", "valuable thing", "resource", "changer", "container", "person", and "a road we travel down". It indicates that metaphorical representation of time and thought are the result of panhuman cognition.Meanwhile, the thesis analyzes the differences in concrete metaphorical expressions between English and Chinese, which are caused by different history, customs and environments. However, the underlying concepts of time are coherent.