A Comparative Study Of The Conceptual Systems Of Love Metaphors In English And Chinese From A Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

With the rising of the cognitive linguistics, the role of metaphor has acquired a renewed recognition. In the traditional rhetoric, metaphor is only a figure of speech; while in the newly rising cognitive linguistics, metaphor occupies a central position, and it is regarded as an important cognitive tool to help us understand this world better and clearer. It is so important that it has become the metaphor we live by.This dissertation makes a comparative study of love metaphors in English and Chinese from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, with the aim of supporting the contemporary cognitive theory of metaphor from the viewpoints of both English and Chinese culture.Traditionally, metaphor was viewed as a matter of language, as a set of extraordinary or figurative linguistic expressions whose meaning is reducible to some set of literal propositions. This view can be traced back to as early as Aristotle, who defined metaphor in terms of deviation from ordinary usage: "Metaphor consists of giving the thing a name that belongs to something else" (from Ricoeur 1975: 13). According to this view, metaphor is primarily decorative.and ornamental in nature. Viewed as such, metaphor was called a figure of speech, and its study was confined mostly to literature and rhetoric (Lakoff 1986).There exist several theories of metaphor understanding, such as the comparison theory, the substitution theory, the interactionist theory, the grammatical metaphor theory etc. These theories can be classified as the semantic theories of metaphor. As to metaphor, it is not enough to seek interpretation only from the semantic perspective, for the use and understanding of metaphor have to touch upon its context. Semantics deals with the literal meaning of an utterance. Upon this base, in addition to the details of context, pragmatics may make explanations of the metaphorical meaning of an utterance.But pragmatians have to do two things: firstly, differentiate metaphor from other tropes. The criteria Grice brings forth can partly solve the problem, but the characteristics of the tropes have to be found out so as to be able to differentiate metaphor from other tropes clearly. Secondly, interpret the utterance that is regarded as metaphor. Generally speaking, differently from the ordinary utterance that has a conversational implicature, metaphorical language is often based on the similarity of two things. For example, we can say someone is a fox just because they two have similarities in character, that is, slyness. The similarity between human heart and stone is the character of hardness and coldness.So pragmatians need get help from psychologists. To build up association between the similarities of things is the psychological base of metaphor, which ought to be offered by psychologists.The interpretation of metaphor is a piece of complex work, therefore, it will be unsuccessful to make explanations only from the semantic perspective, or from pragmatic perspective, or from psychological perspective respectively. The interpretation of metaphor needs the cooperation of these disciplines.So the rising of cognitive linguistics offers some insight on the explanation of the nature of metaphor. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the founders of cognitive linguistics, metaphor is pervasive and essential in language and thought, and is a matter of thought. Human conceptual systems "are pervasively and ineliminably structured by metaphor, metonymy, and other kinds of imaginative structure" (Johnson 1995: 158). In the contemporary paradigm, metaphor is studied as systems of human conceptualization, operating deep in human thought and cognition and, at the same time, surfacing in everyday language in a systematic manner.In this dissertation a large number of love metaphors of both English and Chinese are investigated systematically to reveal the conceptual systems of love behind. It is found that English and Chinese love metaphors share similar central conceptual system LOVEIS A UNITY or we can say LOVE ARE TWO INSEPA...