A Comparative Study Of Korean And Chinese Body Idioms From Cognitive Perspective

Human body and organs make one of the foundations and starting points for human cognitive activity,and they also are an important source of basic and frequently used vocabulary.Therefore,many languages have human body related words and idioms.Both in the Chinese and Korean languages there is a large number of idioms containing metaphors of the human organs.The existence of these idioms is inseparable from people's long-term natural and cultural life experience,they reflect cognitive characteristics and unique culture.In order to understand such idioms and metaphors they contain,mindset analyzing and culture interpreting through the language representation are inevitable.Idioms concerning human body in Chinese and Korean languages are the research object of this study.The research material covers frequently used idioms involving 26 human body parts such as head,neck,trunk,limbs,five viscera and six entrails,etc.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,this paper mainly applies the Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson,Humboldt's Language World View,Spair-Whorf 's Linguistic Relativity and other linguistic philosophies and cultural studies as the theoretical framework to explore the similarities and differences of cognitive approaches in human body idioms,as well as the cause of their formation in the Korean and Chinese languages.This study first analyzes human body idioms and metonyms in both Chinese and Korean languages based on classification statistics,and then based on semantic analysis it carries out comparative analysis of the spatial metaphors and containment metaphors in human body idioms.Further,this study continues to discuss from various angles and levels the metaphorical types,metaphorical mechanisms and the mapping relationships conveyed in metaphors.Lastly,this study comprehensively analyzes the phenomenon of mapping from human body to various target domains,a comprehensive study of metaphors is conducted from the source domain to the target domain,and similarities and differences between Chinese and Korean human body metaphor mechanisms and their types are compared from various angles.There are two types of idiom mapping models in the human body related metaphors in both Chinese and Korean languages,namely the projection from the human body domain to the non-human body domain,and the projection from the non-human body domain to the human body domain.The former type is conducive to the formation and expression of new human concepts,and according to results of this study,in Chinese and Korean languages there are two main types of projection to the non-human body domain: from human body domain onto “specific domain” and onto “abstract domain”.Projection from the non-human body domain to the human body domain is beneficial to humans' further understanding of themselves and their expression of related objects or concepts and its' non-human body domains could be divided into the following kinds: spatial domain,color domain and taste domain.Lastly,the study analyzes the similarities and differences of the mapping models of the human body metaphors between Chinese and Korean idioms by researching idioms with the same “source domains” and “target domains” and those with different “source domains” and “target domains”.Based on the comparative analysis of Chinese and Korean human-body related metaphorical idioms,this paper further conducts an extensive research of cultural aspects,explores the metaphorical cognitive mechanism of the Chinese and Korean nationalities,and summarizes the different cultures,mindsets and mapping patterns reflected in the Chinese and Korean languages.