Embodiment Of Chinese Qi Metaphors

Qi is the cultural wonder which crystallizes Chinese people's understanding of the outside world and themselves.It is an essential Chinese philosophical concept,reflecting the ancient Chinese worldview and cosmology.In all ages,Chinese people are skilled in talking about wide-ranging affairs in terms of qi.Thus,it semantically embodies polysemy and vagueness.The theory of conceptual metaphor brings the semantic study into the cognitive scope.The embodied philosophy claims that body and culture provide the experiential bases for the formation of the conceptual metaphors which is the generative mechanism of abstract concepts.Thus,the theory of conceptual metaphor based on the embodied philosophy is applied to study the Chinese cultural keyword qi to systematically discuss how the conceptual network of qi is structured.The research questions of this dissertation include:(1)As a cultural key word,how is the conceptual network of qi constructed through metonymies and metaphors?(2)What are the experiential bases of these conceptual metonymies and metaphors?(3)How does bodily experiences and culture,as the experiential bases,play a role in the formation of these metonymies and metaphors as well as what is the relationship between them?On the basis of the corpus-driven means,the dissertation discusses the above three issues,along with the diachronic and comparative research methods,and comes to the following findings.Culture is inscribed on bodily experiences,which impregnates the QI AS ENERGY metaphor with the Chinese cultural specificity.Based on bodily experiences of air and breath,qi is construed as energy.Simultaneously,the Chinese view of SHEN and Chinese agricultural civilization leave their imprints on such bodily experiences.Consequently,qi tends to be not only material rather spiritual.As well,its changes are understood via the process of the plant growth in four seasons,and it should be cherished as rare food.Cultural inflecting of our body results in the generation of the cultural body,because of which the Life AS QI metaphor takes shape.Despite the commonalities of human bodies,the Chinese body view motivates Chinese people to systematically construe the source of life,its features,and its operating mechanism in terms of qi,which creates the unique Chinese view of life.The QI FOR LIFE metonymy provides the basis for such a metaphor.Culture associates bodily experiences with subjective experiences,which provides the motivation for the FATE AS QI metaphor.Based on bodily experiences,the FATE FOR QI metonymy comes into being in the first place.It offer the basis for the FATE AS QI metaphor under the influence of the Chinese qi astrology and feng shui theory.Accordingly,diachronic research demonstrates the evolution of the metaphorical cognition.Cultural scaffolding maps the relatively abstract cultural knowledge into specific bodily experiences,which constructs the QI AS DAO metaphor.On the one hand,tiandao via water is used to explain the moving rules of qi based on bodily experiences of water.On the other hand,human abstract characteristics,including emotions,moralities and roles,are mapped to illustrate the various functions of qi based on rendao via ren “benevolence /man”.The contrastive method demonstrates there exist bi-directional mappings in the QI AS DAO metaphor.The interactions between body and culture give rise to the metaphors,including QI AS ENERGY,LIFE AS QI,FATE AS QI,and QI AS DAO,thus establishing the conceptual network of qi.Through painstaking research on the conceptual network of qi,some theoretical implications can be drawn as follows.(1)Mappings of conceptual metaphors can be bi-directional.Concrete bodily experiences can be mapped onto the abstract domain to structure a concept.As well,abstract concepts can be projected into the concrete domain to understand some bodily experiences.In the QI AS DAO metaphor,concrete water is loaned to elaborate on abstract moving rules of qi.In reverse,abstract human characteristics such as emotions,moralities and roles are mapped into the relative concrete domain to clarify various functions of qi.(2)It seems difficult to separate the manipulation of the body on the world from its manipulation on the body.Only by combining the two can we see the panorama of the semantic formation.Ancient Chinese perceived that breath was closely linked with energy in the human body.As a result,qi is regarded as energy.Meanwhile,Chinese agricultural civilization allows that the plant serves to understand changes of qi as energy metaphorically.(3)Conceptual metaphor does not represent an evolutionary downfallsince the source domains of conceptual metaphors that form the concept is by no means only confined to bodily experiences.Moreover,metaphorical cognition is not unchanging but evolving.In ancient Chinese,the FATE AS QI metaphor mainly arises from the interaction between bodily experiences and culture,together with the QI FOR FATE metonymy which also provides the basis for it.However,in modern Chinese,the metonymy disappears on the one hand,and the metaphorical meaning expands on the other hand.(4)And culture does not merely act as a filter to select bodily experiences in accord with a particular culture.Instead,it will impregnate them by means of cultural inscribing,inflection,conceptualizing and scaffolding.The primary concepts based on bodily experiences are not totally universal,but may also show the cultural specificity.Although the human body has commonalities in the physiological characteristics,the unique Chinese view of body gives rise to the formation of the LIFE AS QI metaphor.Language is the product of the biological organism as much as the cultural conventions(Evans & Levinson,2009).Therefore,both the roles of the body and culture can not be neglected in the study of language.We should neither place the role of the body on the altar and ignore the cultural one,nor exaggerate the role of culture and ignore the bodily one.We had better utilize the multi-perspective and multi-level methods.