A Cognitive Approach To Love Metaphors In English And Chinese

With the rising of the cognitive linguistics, the role of metaphor has acquired arenewed recognition. In the traditional rhetoric, metaphor is only a figure of speech;while in the newly rising cognitive linguistics, metaphor occupies a central position, andit is regarded as an important cognitive tool to help us understand this world better andclearer. 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 thosein Chinese from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, with the aim of supporting thecontemporary cognitive theory of metaphor from the viewpoints of both English andChinese cultures.Traditionally, metaphor is viewed as a matter of language, and as a set ofextraordinary or figurative linguistic expressions whose meaning is reducible to someset of literal propositions. This view can be traced back to as early as Aristotle, whodefined metaphor in terms of deviation from ordinary usage:"Metaphor consists ofgiving the thing a name that belongs to something else"(Ricoeur, 1975:13). Accordingto 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 literatureand rhetoric (Lakoff, 1986). Now, there are several theories of metaphor understanding,such as the comparison theory, the substitution theory, the interaction theory, etc..However, the rising of cognitive linguistics offers some insights into the explanation ofthe nature of metaphor. According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the founders ofcognitive linguistics, metaphor is pervasive and essential in language and thought, andis a matter of thought. Human conceptual systems are pervasive and are structured bymetaphor.A large number of love metaphors in both English and Chinese are investigated inthis dissertation. They are categorized into nine groups, according to the theory ofconceptual metaphor. It is found that English and Chinese share many same conceptualmetaphors such as journey, human, container, plant, economic exchange, fire, war, andhuman body, to understand love. However, some differences also exist: they do notshare the conceptual metaphor―LOVE IS NUTRIENT, and Chinese tends to utilizemore bodyparts than English does in depicting love.This study supports that metaphor is so pervasive and irreducible in the expression ofabstract emotion like love that it appears to play an essential or indispensable role in ourunderstanding and speaking. It also offers evidence supporting Lakoff and K?vecses'...