A Constrastive Study Of English And Chinese Emotion Metaphors In Weather Terms

Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a figure of speech and a mere matter of language. However, the latest research on cognitive linguistics has demonstrated that metaphor is a common cognitive phenomenon and it is pervasive in everyday life. According to conceptual metaphor theory, the conceptual metaphors we have in our language are rooted in our bodily experience, which is called the experiential basis of conceptual metaphors. The meaning and understanding of a metaphor are realized through the mapping of two domains-the source domain and the target domain, and there exists a correspondence between the two domains.Since emotions are rather abstract concepts, they are usually conceptualized and expressed in metaphorical terms. Studies have shown that the concept of emotion can be mapped from various source domains, such as bodily processes and activities, spatial words, fluid and so on. It has been pointed out that weather is among the various source domains which can be used metaphorically to talk about the target domain of emotion. But few studies have been made to give a substantial analysis of it in order to discover how the weather terms express different kinds of emotions in both English and Chinese or to make a comparison between the two.By choosing emotion metaphors in weather terms as the focus of investigation, this research makes a comparison between English and Chinese. Five emotions, including happiness, anger, indifference, sadness and fear, are chosen in this research and we examine them in order to see how they are expressed metaphorically through weather terms. Based on a qualitative analysis of a large amount of linguistic data of both dictionaries and on-line corpora, this thesis tends to display how weather terms are employed metaphorically in terms of conceptual metaphors of these five emotions and explain the similarities and differences between English and Chinese from the aspects of geography, culture, language and so on. Being a supplement to the previous studies on emotion metaphors, this systematic study of emotion metaphors in weather terms can reinforce some theories of the cognitive approach to metaphor. It can also help the English learners gain a better understanding of emotion metaphor and thus can improve their skills of using it. Besides, this contrastive study can help people to gain a deeper comprehension of the similarities and differences between English and Chinese.According to this study, we find that both in English and Chinese the abstract concept of EMOTION is expressed by a relatively concrete concept-WEATHER through conceptual metaphors, which are mainly ontological ones. The following are the major findings:1. In the conceptualization of emotion in weather terms, the two languages generally share the similar metaphors. As to the five emotions, both English and Chinese have HAPPINESS IS FINE WEATHER/BREEZE, ANGER IS FIERCE WEATHER (THUNDER, STORM)/HOT WEATHER, INDIFFERENCE IS COLD WEATHER/ICE/FROST/DULL WEATHER, SADNESS IS CLOUD/FOG, FEAR IS COLD (CHILLY) WEATHER/THUNDER. These similarities can be attributed to universal cognition-there is commonness in people's bodily experience of the weather.2. There are also some differences of emotion metaphor in weather terms between English and Chinese, for example, in Chinese culture the season of autumn often conveys a sad feeling to people and there is a metaphor SADNESS IS AUTUMN, which does not exist in English. Such individualities can be explained from three aspects:different geographical surroundings, different cultural models and different linguistic forms.There exist some limitations in this research such as the relative subjectivity in terms of data-collection. Still, it has some theoretical and practical implications for further studies on emotion metaphors.