An Intercultural Study On Metaphor In Chinese And English

Metaphor is a traditional topic for poetry and literary studies. However, metaphor has recently attracted the increasing attention of philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and is generally regarded as a testing ground for theories of meaning in particular and theories of language comprehension in general. There is a lot more to metaphor than mere linguistics. Metaphor reflects the way we think, it has the power to frame our thoughts, and it may be used as a communicative tool, both within and between disciplines. Metaphor even has the capacity to promote shifts in established patterns of thought. The application of novel metaphorical schemas has been used as a means of changing the way we think about human organizations, and metaphor is today recognized as a powerful management tool.Nowadays, metaphors are used widely in daily life all over the world, and metaphor plays an important role in cross-cultural communication. Therefore, it is necessary to study on metaphor from an intercultural view. Although scholars have done a large amount of research studies in both fields of metaphor and culture, most of these studies drew their conclusions only based on English data. Whether the results are the same for other languages remain unknown. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out more research work focused on cross-cultural aspects of metaphor. With respect to metaphor, the focus will be on conceptual metaphor, because it provides a good approach to discuss different metaphorical expressions based on human concepts and experience. There are comparisons between English and Chinese, to show the evidence of cross-cultural variation. These two languages belong to two different language groups and are likely to involve different cultural ideas and assumptions. Language and Culture are closely related to the different cultural backgrounds gives the metaphor of different languages in different cultures. Therefore, in the process of learning metaphor, cultural differences must be paid close attention. Differences in culture always influence the features of language. As significant parts of language, figures of speech have different connotations under different cultural background. Hence, while learning metaphor in English, people must pay highly attention to the cultural differences. This article is about contrast on the cultural differences of figures of speech between English and Chinese by exemplification. This thesis consists of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. Its main contents are as follows:The first part is introduction, which mainly makes a brief summary of the previous research of metaphor, and then points out the great significance of the analysis on metaphor from an intercultural view.The second part is the main body, which is made up of four chapters:Chapter One mainly introduces the basic theories of metaphor both from the traditional view and cognitive view. These theories are the theoretical supports for the study in the next chapters.Chapter Two concentrates on the relationship between culture and metaphor. Firstly, culture plays a fundamental role in metaphor. It points out that most metaphors are grounded in systematic correlations within our daily experience. And also, culture has influenced metaphor a lot, including the choices of the Vehicle. Secondly, metaphorical thought and creativity is reflected in culture. Furthermore, metaphor and cultural model always interact with each other, and this interaction leads to their mutual growth.Chapter Three focuses on the university and variation of metaphor. Meanwhile, the causes of the university and variation of metaphor are discussed in this section.Chapter Four introduces comparative study on Chinese and English metaphor. From the study respectively on time metaphor and emotion metaphor, people can know more about the differences and similarities between Chinese and English metaphor.The last part is conclusion, which makes a summary to the whole paper, and points out the main importance for learning metaphor from a cross-cultural view.