| The cognitive law that man cognizes things from the near to the far, from entity to non-entity, from the simple to the complex, and from the concrete to the abstract determines the basic role of body parts in cognizing the world. This thesis, under the framework of cognitive linguistics and by applying Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory, is undertaken to make a comparison of HEAD, HEART and HAND between English and Chinese and study the similarities as well as differences and the causes for this. The SPSS and Chi-square Test are used to illustrate the conclusions.The data used for analysis are got through Chinese and English dictionaries and second-hand examples provided by other scholars who studied body metaphor. The total number of the collected data is 704 with 285 in English and 419 in Chinese. They are mainly phrases, idioms and sentences.The comparison is undertaken by different mapping models concerning each body word both in English and Chinese. After the contrastive comparison, the research discovers that English and Chinese metaphorical use of HEAD, HAND and HEART are more similar than different, especially in the mapping from human body domain to non-body domain and from non-body domain to body domain. This reflects the universal cognitive principle to some degree and confirms Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual theory. Meanwhile, there still exist certain differences, especially in the mapping within human body-parts. In Chinese, there are many four-word idioms of mapping within different body parts to express the relationship of different things or social relationship while it's a gap in English. These differences are due to different cultural models. This thesis will, to a certain degree, enrich the study of body metaphor. At the same time, it proves metaphor's cognitive nature and metaphorical nature of human thinking from the perspective of body metaphor. In addition, this research will be helpful to the vocabulary and rhetoric teaching in English and Chinese.
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