A Contrastive Analysis Of English And Chinese Time Proverbs-From A Theoretical Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

The traditional research of metaphor is confined to the understanding that metaphor only serves as a rhetoric method, which belongs to the research domain of poetry and literature. The research of metaphor nowadays has been expanded into the fields of cognitive psychology, philosophy and pragmatics etc. The researchers view metaphor as the testing ground of various theories of meaning and language understanding. Approaching metaphor from the aspect of cognition of people can be dated back to Shelly who considers that metaphor is not something decorative outside of language but a way for people to experience the world, to think and to live. It is the key of human languages(严世清1995).In the past several decades, many different metaphor theories came into being in the western world: Salience-imbalance Theory; Domains-interaction Theory; Structure-mapping Theory; Class-inclusion Theory etc in the field of cognitive psychology and Grice's Conversational Implication Theory, Searle's Indirect Speech Act Theory, Davison's No Meaning Theory, Indurkhaya's Similarity Creating Theory, Lakoff &Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Sperber Wilson's Relevance Theory and Fauconnier&Turner's Conceptual Blending Theory etc(徐章宏: 2007). Among these theories, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the frame work of this paper, is the most suitable to be applied to the analysis of conventional metaphors like time proverbs.Time has always been the subject of study of natural science and philosophy. It is everywhere but abstract and can not be seen and touched, so the manifestation of time is metaphorical. Among various expressions of time, time proverbs are even more widely known by people of all walks of life. They are the generalization and summarization of wit and living experience of people over a long period of time. Time proverbs are clear in structure , vivid in expression, obvious in meaning, sharp in contrast and beautiful in rhythm, so time proverbs and conceptual metaphor are combined together to be analyzed in this paper. The gist of this paper is to find out, under the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, whether both the English and Chinese time proverbs are systematic, what the systematicity is like and what are the similarities and differences between them?Metaphorization means understanding one thing by means of another thing or another experience. Even people who belong to the same cultural background think about time differently. For example: Some say:"Time is a long river", some say:"Time is money"and Others may say:"Time is a slowly moving snail."Why time in the expressions of time proverbs is expressed this way not that way is culturally and individually defined. Then, what kinds of values are embodied by English and Chinese time proverbs? What are the similarities and differences? In another word, what kinds of values and culture contribute to the expressions of English and Chinese time proverbs?Due to the above mentioned points, the author tries analyzing the English and Chinese time proverbs, source domain images and the systematicity. The last but not the least, this paper explores both the English and Chinese cultural elements which affect the thinking patterns about time of English and Chinese people. The author finds out that: (1) The expressions of both English and Chinese time proverbs are systematic. But the source domains are different, and the proverb expressions bear their own features. (2) The cultural coherence is embodied by English time proverbs and also Chinese ones. Because of the common understanding about the human experience some proverbs are quite similar in the two languages. (3)The different culture, different values and different outlook of time contribute to the differences of time proverbs, and in turn, these differences show the different understandings about time. Through this research, the author aims at a deeper understanding of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, time proverbs, values about time and, to some degree, to instruct the research of Chinese and English languages and cross-cultural communication.