Spatial Concepts And CONTAINER Metaphor

Metaphor used to be regarded as a deviation from the ordinary language or figure of speech. It is now believed by cognitive linguists that metaphor is part of the ordinary language and is ubiquitous in our everyday language. It is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. It is a powerful tool for our conceptualization of abstract categories. Metaphor is universal, but there are variations due to cultural differences.In this study a contrastive method is adopted by way of comparing the English concepts IN and OUT with Chinese concepts LI and WAI. All of the spatial concepts are the linguistic expressions, which are mainly employed to realize or instantiate the CONTAINER metaphor.The thesis explores the bodily experience of CONTAINER, from which we obtain entities extended from containers, spatial containers, and abstract notions as containers. We find twelve functions or connotations of containers: a container is an entity with rigidity; it has bounded area with volume; it can be used to store substances, which display different characteristics; the contained can be quantified; what is inside is usually more important than what is outside; being inside the container means being safe and protected; being inside the container means knowing and authority; being inside the container is under control; being inside the container is the process of activities, etc.Then the focus is on the classification of CONTAINER metaphor with the event structure metaphor as basic framework of analysis. Nine types of CONTAINER metaphor are found and expatiated: condition as a container, mental states as containers, time as a container, quantity as a container, visual fields, hearing, or touching fields as containers, social status as a container, linguistic expressions as containers, causation as a container, events or activities as containers, etc. Contrastive method is adopted in each category. Great similarities are found in English and in Chinese, that is, they share all of the categories of CONTAINER metaphor. Minor differences are evident in some categories due to the differences in cultures andlinguistic expressions. For instance, in the emotional states, English tends to use the EMOTION ITSELF IS A CONTAINER whereas Chinese utilizes the HUMAN BODY IS CONTAINER FOR EMOTIONS metaphor more frequently, that is, more body parts are used in the conceptualization of various emotions in Chinese.From the spatial concepts IN, OUT, LI and WAI, the metaphorical mappings occur. The ground of the CONTAINER metaphor is the features or functions of containers, which make the mappings possible, and in the meanwhile constrain the mappings from the source domains onto the target domains.