A Study On Types And Nature Of Sadness Metaphor In English

Emotion is one of the most important and universal human experiences. It depends on human cognition but also influences the latter. People use metaphors to express abstract emotions by resorting to cognitive and perceptive powers. The study of metaphor has a long history and a lot of learners have focused on metaphor study since Aristotle. In 1980, Lakoff and Johnson published Metaphors We Live By, which is the landmark of metaphor study from the view point of cognition.Emotion metaphor is an important kind of metaphor. Domestic and overseas learners mostly focus on emotion metaphor's classifications or a contrastive study but the study on the relationship within the types of emotion metaphor or its nature remains little, so does the research of sadness metaphor. Researchers have done much exploration on the types of sadness metaphor, but the study on the relationship among the types or its nature remains to be further done. Therefore, this paper reclassifies the sadness metaphor on the basis of collecting and analyzing corpus on sadness metaphor, discusses the characteristics and nature of the types of sadness metaphor by taking the Mapping Theory and Prototype Theory as a theoretical framework and considering"the physiological effects of an emotion stand for the emotion"as the central principle.This thesis is composed of six chapters. The first three chapters are introduction, literature review and theoretical framework. Chapter Four and Chapter Five are the body part of the thesis. Chapter Four explores types of sadness metaphor while Chapter Five looks into the relationship among these types as well as its nature. The last chapter is the conclusion of this thesis. By means of discussion and analysis and on the basis of the Mapping Theory and Prototype Theory, this paper reaches the following conclusions: first, the types of the sadness metaphor should be more clearly classified. Based on the collected corpus, this paper reclassifies the sadness metaphor into five types: SADNESS IS PHYSIOLOGICAL REACTIONS, SADNESS IS FLUID IN A CONTAINER, SADNESS IS DOWN, SADNESS IS A KIND OF BAD WEATHER and SADNESS IS BLUE. Second, on the basis of the Mapping Theory and the Prototype Theory and a discussion of the relationship among the types of sadness metaphor, this paper discovers that SADNESS IS PHYSIOLOGICAL REACTIONS is the central metaphor and the prototype, while the other four are non-central metaphors, or the extension of the central metaphor. The non-central metaphors are derived from cognitive activities such as observation, analogy and reasoning. Third, the nature of sadness metaphor is metonymic. While SADNESS IS PHYSIOLOGICAL REACTIONS is the central metaphor and the prototype, or the mapping center of the other four, the principle by which"the physiological effects of an emotion stand for the emotion"is metonymic in its nature. In other words, it can be said that the nature of the sadness metaphor is metonymic. However, whether metaphor in general is metonymic in nature should be explored in detail in further study. It is expected that the research of this paper would do some help to the study of emotion metaphor and language teaching.