A Comparative Analysis Of "Fear" Metaphors Between English And Chinese

The study of metaphors has a long history. It has been conveyed from rhetoric, semantics and pragmatics to cognition. Traditionally, metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase that denotes a certain object or idea is applied to another word or phrase to imply some similarities between them. To Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors are not just matters of language, but are used extensively in reasoning and understanding. This is very different from the classical model of metaphor, which claims that metaphors are artifacts of language use, and have nothing to do with meaning or understanding. Studies in cognitive linguistics have confirmed their claim that metaphor has conceptual and cognitive foundations. Metaphor is now widely recognized as representing and relating to conceptual domains and life experiences in ways previously unacknowledged. Metaphor in essence is model of thought and effective cognitive tool for people to understand the world.A metaphor (or figurative comparison) in which one idea (or conceptual domain) is understood in terms of another. In cognitive linguistics, the conceptual domain from which we draw metaphorical expressions to understand another conceptual domain is known as the source domain. The conceptual domain that is understood in this way is the target domain. Conceptual metaphor and linguistic metaphor are two different concepts, but they are closely related to each other. The former refers to those abstract notions while the latter is actual linguistic phrases that realize or instantiate those notions in one way or another. Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual rather than linguistic in nature. According to the cognitive functions, conceptual metaphor can be classified into three types: structural metaphor, ontological metaphor, and orientational metaphor. The two features of conceptual metaphor are universality and systematicity.Emotion is an important aspect of human experience and in nature is an abstract concept or feeling. There has been a rapid increase in the number of cognitive psychologists carrying out research in the area of recognition and emotion. Emotion and cognition are two major aspects of human mental life that are widely regarded as distinct but interacting. The study of human emotion is of great significance towards the study of human cognition. Emotion is often expressed in language which is mostly in metaphorical terms. Emotion metaphor is a conventional metaphor in English in which any of various kinds of emotions is represented as an unrelated thing, person, state, event, or substance.The aim of this dissertation was to investigate into the use of fear metaphors in English and Chinese, and explore the similarities and differences between the two languages through the analysis of a large amount of linguistic data from English and Chinese. The academic value of this thesis is to probe how shared experience and cultural variation influences the conceptualization of fear metaphor. The research finds that there are many similarities and differences in the fear metaphors in English and Chinese. The common human bodily experiences and universal physiologic phenomena caused similarities in the conceptualization of fear metaphors, while the differences result from different cultural models. This dissertation tends to clarify these differences of fear metaphors by referring to the yin-yang theory, five elements theory in Chinese philosophy and traditional Chinese medicine and the "Doctrine of the Four Humours" in western philosophy.