| In today's society emotion is considered as the central and most pervasive aspect of human experience. How to conceptualize emotion is always an issue of concern. According to contemporary theories, metaphor is a matter of people's thought and reason, being a mapping between two different domains in essence. It is an important cognitive tool and reveals how people perceive unfamiliar, abstract concepts via familiar, concrete ones on the basis of bodily experience. The purpose of this paper is to study how fear—one basic emotion term is metaphorized in English and Chinese from cognitive aspects. Furthermore, it looks in depth at the reasons for similarities and differences between English and Chinese fear metaphors.Based on the principles about metaphor identification concluded by Shu Dingfang, this paper makes an exhaustive search for fear metaphors in British National Corpus—one English corpus and its Chinese equivalent—Center for Chinese Linguistics. Then, on the basis of K?vecses'research, the metaphorical expressions are classified into 12 groups and analyzed from the perspective of cognition. Similarities and differences exist side by side between English and Chinese fear metaphors and the reason for this are explained from cultural aspects.On the basis of contrastive analysis of fear metaphors, from English and Chinese corpuses, this study verifies the general law which has been proposed about emotion metaphors: based on common bodily experience, universalities exist in emotion metaphors in different languages; meanwhile there are culturally specific characteristics as governed by different cultural models. This paper finds that differences between English and Chinese fear metaphors have a close relationship with Chinese medicine theory, Chinese traditional philosophy and ghost cultures in the West and East. The findings and results fill the gap in fear metaphor study and give an implication for learning emotion words in foreign languages.
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