| Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a particular rhetoric device, however, it is not enough just to study it as a rhetoric means or a linguistic phenomenon. Metaphor, to be exact, belongs to a cognitive rather than linguistic phenomenon. It plays important cognitive functions. Our ordinary conceptual system by means of which we live, think and act is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Metaphor is to recognize the experience and category in one cognitive area through the experience and category of another. To be exact, metaphor is the projection from source domain to target domain. 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 man's cognizing the world.Conceptual metaphor is an important concept in Conceptual Metaphor Theory which was proposed by Lakoff. Conceptual metaphors are rooted in our bodily experiences. Human body undoubtedly has the most important cognitive status in human being's cognition. Therefore, body metaphor is a main cognitive method of human being too. The study of body metaphors deserves much more attention. Although some Chinese scholars have made elaborate contrastive studies of English and Chinese body metaphors, they did not explain thoroughly the causes for the similarities and differences.The present thesis is intended to explore the metaphorical human body words in English and Chinese within the framework of cognitive linguistic, including contrastive analysis of word-formational types between English and Chinese, working mechanism and characteristics of human body metaphor between English and Chinese, and projection models of human body words in English and Chinese, and then the causes of the differences and similarities are also discussed. The present thesis is organized in the following way:chapter 1 is the introduction. It discusses the research background, the objective of research, the research approach and the organization of this thesis. Chapter 2 is a literature review about the metaphor research at home and abroad. This chapter first introduces the dependent study of metaphor as one of the figures of speech, and then the dependent study develops into the independent study of metaphor. Here, metaphor is a cognitive means. Therefore, this chapter is a summary of ancient and modern metaphor research in the world. Chapter 3 describes the metaphorical cognition on human body words from the perspective of word-formational analysis, the working mechanism and the characteristics of metaphorical cognition on human body words in English and Chinese. Chapter 4 introduces the projection model of metaphorical cognition on human body words in English and Chinese. Then, the reasons behind those similarities and differences are discussed. Chapter 5 is the conclusion, mainly summarizing and generalizing the major findings of the whole thesis and pointing out the limitations and the questions to be further studied as well.
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