| The present dissertation is intended to explore the metaphorical motion events in English and Chinese within the framework of cognitive linguistics. There are three research areas covered: (1) to analyze the metaphorical conceptualization of motion verbs in English and Chinese, including the similarities and differences of domain mapping processes involved in primary, complex and event structure metaphors as well as the corresponding influencing factors; (2) to explore the similarities and differences of lexical realizations of motion verbs in English and Chinese; (3) to identify the typological similarities and differences in English and Chinese with the aim to provide a plausible explorations for Chinese typological preference. The metaphorical motion conceptualizations in languages are generally realized by verbs with paralleled semantic and syntactic properties, the present dissertation uses the term'verb metaphor (VME)'throughout the whole research work for the sake of clarity and brevity. The special research interest emerges mainly because of the fact that prior theoretical attention has focused almost exclusively on the cognitive aspects of metaphor, thus left a gap in areas about comprehensive studies of Chinese lexical realizations as well as adequate factors within the theory of conceptual metaphor. The present research adopts the theory of conceptual (primay & complex) metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Grady 1999b) to identify the similarities and differences of cognitive mapping process between English and Chinese; besides, following the typological analysis proposed by Talmy (2000a) and Slobin (1996), the author argues that the lexical realizations of VMEs in Chinese are not the typical member of satellite-framed language as English does.Concerning the above mentioned facts, the present dissertation aims to address the following three research questions:1. What similarities and differences underlie the mapping process of verb metaphors of motion in English and Chinese?2. What are the lexical realizations in English and Chinese metaphorical motion events?3. To what extent English and Chinese are typologically satellite-framed languages as suggested by Talmy (2000a)?Within the framework of cognitive linguistics, verb metaphors of motion are generally conceptualized similarly in both English and Chinese, however, different metaphorical instantiations found can be interpreted through cognitive processes as elaboration, conventionality, specificity etc.. Besides, cultural and cognitive preferences and styles seem to be responsible for variation in metaphorical thought. Both English and Chinese express manner of motion typically in the main verb of a clause and convey path information by path satellites or path verbs, however, English and Chinese do show different means of encoding in terms of manner, path and ground dimensions concerning their grammatical realizations of metaphorical motion events. Superficially, English and Chinese are believed to be typical members of satellite-framed languages; however, when packaging manner and path with move of motion by following zi-based Chinese system, it makes more sense to view Chinese as primarily a verb-framed language and only secondarily a satellite-framed language, thus, alters Talmy's typological classification of languages.The ultimate purpose of the dissertation is four-pronged. Firstly, I mean to determine the conceptual basis for verbal metaphorical expressions in English and Chinese. Secondly, I am interested in studying the role played by cultural models in the expression and interpretation of verbal metaphorical expressions in English and Chinese. Thirdly, following the language typology provided by Talmy (1985, 2000a, b), I intend to study the lexical realizations of VMEs in English and Chinese, especially, the three dominant components for their formal representations, namely, the encoding of manner, path, and ground elements. Finally, based on the analytical results concerning English and Chinese Lexical realizations of VMEs, I argue that Talmy's (2000a, b) typological classification of Chinese is problemic due to the neglect of the original Chinese zi-based linguistic system.There are two types of data collection for the present research. First , the data used in exploring the similarities and differences between English and Chinese primary and complex metaphors were extracted from two kinds of written discourses in English and Chinese. The first type of data is 20 short stories (10 in each language); the second type of data includes breaking news on tsunami from 10 widely acknowledged news resources. Apart from the previous means of data used in identifying verb metaphor within the framework of conceptual metaphors, there is still another type of data collected in detecting the lexical realizations of VMEs from a corpus of 1502 English and 1234 Chinese sentences. All the sentences are randomly chosen from 30 Egnlish and Chinese short stories (15 in each). 115 Chinese and 140 English entries of verbs of motion were finally chosen. The reason why these verbs have been selected is that they are the most frequent verbs of motion. The collected corpra were given descriptive and interpretive analyses, based on results of the SPSS statistical program.The analyses bring forth to meaningful results to verify the research hypotheses. As expected, the results show close crosslinguistic similarity in the target domains and the metaphorical mappings. Crosslinguistic variability, on the other hand, is found to be strongly expressed in the source domain, particularly in the details of the motion event itself. Thus, the data clearly suggest the specification of the source domain structure to be the best candidate for systematic crosslinguistic variation, rather than the levels of metaphorical mappings. My data also show that the highly specific character of some of the domains involved in basic mappings undermines the theory in that specificity of the domains is related to cultural models. In terms of lexical realizations of English and Chinese VMEs, English encoded manner of motion at a higher rate; Chinese, on the other hand, tends to display the manner information by means of various kinds of combinations of morphological components. Compared with English, which uses satellite-framed patterns to express Path, the Chinese use of path verbs reveals two important characteristics. The first is the pervasiveness of Deictic Perspective; the second is a limitation on cumulative Path components. the analysis of ground elements in English and Chinese shows that both languages encode ground information at comparable rates, with no significant differences in either the amount of ground expressions produced in the two languages, or the number of ground expressions attached a single verb of metaphorical motion. Bsed on the analytical results of lexical realizations of English and Chinese VMEs, Chinese is argued to differ from both satellite-framed languages and verb-framed languages as proposed by Talmy (2000a, b), it is more plausible to classify Chinese as primarily a verb-framed and only secondarily a satellite-framed language. The contributions of the present research for the study of verb metaphor can besummarized into the following three aspects:1. It offers a systematic comparative analysis of the metaphorical motion conceptualization in English and Chinese within a cognitive linguistic framework.2. Lexical realizations of verb metaphor are firstly discussed and compared in both English and Chinese in details, which so far largely remained intact.3. Results provided from the analysis of the naturally-occurring discourse claim that the inseparability of the conceptual and cultural aspects of metaphor.
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