The Cognitive Approach To The Conceptual Metaphor Of Water In Chinese

Ever since 1970's, there has been a growing interest in metaphor study not only in linguistics, but also in the fields of sociology, psychology and philosophy. A contemporary theory, Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory, regards metaphor not merely as a matter of language but of thinking and cognition. Metaphor is defined as a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system. And the essence of metaphor is to understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another.Under the framework of cognitive linguistics, this thesis makes use of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory to explore the conceptual metaphors of water in Chinese (water as the source domain), with the aim to answer the following three questions: (1) What are the main conceptual metaphors of water in Chinese? (2) What are the underlying embodied and cultural motivations for these conceptual metaphors of water in Chinese? (3) What cognition functions are reflected in these metaphors and what role do these conceptual metaphors of water play in shaping the Chinese culture and philosophy?The source of the data in this research mainly comes from the Modern Chinese Corpus developed by Center for Chinese Linguistics, PKU. While another small part of the data come from the Chinese idiom dictionary and poetry anthology so as to make the resultant data more balanced for further studies. The analysis of the data yields the following findings: (1) There are eight major categories of conceptual metaphor of water in Chinese, namely MOVEMENT IS WATER, TIME IS WATER, MONEY IS WATER, EMOTIONS ARE WATER, POWER IS WATER, HUMAN BEINGS ARE WATER, THOUGHTS (IDEAS) ARE WATER, and VIRTUE IS WATER. The experiential basis of these water metaphors comes from our body, our interaction with the environment and the Chinese culture. (2) Those metaphorical expressions of the conceptual metaphor of water are abundant and ubiquitous in Chinese language, their source domain vocabulary is of cultural traits and the most frequently used metaphorical expressions are four-character idioms. Geographical, philosophical, and cultural factors are found to be responsible for these characteristics. (3) These conceptual metaphors of water reflect the cognitive function of metaphor---facilitating the understanding of abstract concepts, generating new knowledge and creating new perspective to view things. (4) TIME IS WATER, VIRTUE IS WATER metaphors and etc. show that water, with its extraordinarily rich capacity for generating imagery, provided the root metaphors forsome most fundamental concepts in Chinese culture and philosophy, indicating that thegeneral cosmic principles were the basis for the Chinese understanding of the nature ofman in both religion and philosophy.