A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In The Chinese And The American TV Shows

Taking a cognitive linguistic approach, this study intends to use conceptual metaphor analysis in order to examine and compare the verbal utterances of the people involved in the two entertainment TV shows: the "2006 Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girl's Voice" (SGV for short) in China and "American Idol (Season Five)" (AI for short) in USA .The study sets out with three-fold aims: firstly, to identify and categorize the metaphors used in the shows so as to explore whether evidence can be found to support the observation made by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) that "metaphor is pervasive in everyday life"; secondly, to testify the cognitive linguistic theory on the systematicity and cultural coherence of conceptual metaphors used both in the Chinese and the American TV shows and the cultural influence on the metaphors; thirdly, through a contrastive analysis of the similarities and differences between metaphors found in the Chinese TV show and those in the American one, to investigate how people of the two cultures conceptualize the shows, particularly the nature of the shows and the relationship of the people involved, as is shown by the metaphorical expressions used in the two shows respectively.It has been found that as a common part of everyday life, entertainment TV shows are indeed full of metaphors, and while Journey Metaphors and Family Metaphors are found in both shows as major metaphors, the Chinese show also features War metaphors and Food metaphors, as opposed to Container Metaphors and Game Metaphors that characterize the metaphorical expressions of the American show. This is due to the different conceptualization of the shows by the two different people respectively: the Chinese show is conceptualized mostly as a sort of fighting, while the American counterpart is conceptualized as a fun-seeking game, which is explicable by the cognitive linguistic view termed as "cultural models".