A Comparative Study Of The Metaphors Of Metaphors In Chinese And Russian

Metaphor has been a popular object of studies for thousands of years. In the beginning people regarded it no more than a matter of language. From the perspective of modern studies, methaphor is seen as a means of understanding the world, a mechanism of establishing relationship between different notions. Since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s book "Metaphors We Live By", studies of metaphor from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics has been receiving much attention. Lakoff and Johnson claimed metaphors are pervasive in our daily language and are the way we conceptualize the world around us. Their research was summurised in The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, or Conceptual Metaphor Theory.Human’s cognition is closely correlated with the body experience, we learn about abstract and unfamiliar things via what we are familiar with, which is the way to conceptualize and understand the world. This phenomenon is also common in any language, as metaphors are perceptually based on everyday real-life experiences. Taste, being a part of our sense perception, plays an important role in the way we cognize the world. It’s no wonder, that cognitive metaphors exist in the domain of taste as well, as people often use taste to refer to some more abstract concepts, such as emotions.The thesis in hand, analyses Chinese and Russian taste metaphors from the cognitive perspective. In this thesis we tried to summerise and analyse the data received from the study of the language corpuses regarding metaphors of taste (“酸,甜,苦,辣"and "Kиcлblи, CлaдKии, ropbKии, ocтръIи"). By examining the national corpuses of the Chinese and Russian languages, we have found out that the taste metaphors are abundant in both languages. Moreover, many of them are mapped upon the same domains, for example Russian "cлaдKии гoлoc, гopъKaя yлbl(?)ka, ocтpъle3aмeчaHия" and Chinese“甜美的声音,苦笑,辛辣的评论”and are corresponding not only in domains they are being mapped upon, but also in their metaphorical meanings. Despite of the numerous similarities we observed in the two languages, there is also a certain number of differences.The thesis consists of five parts:the introduction; the theory basis; the analysis of the data received from the language corpuses; analysis of the results of the questionnaire and summary.