Explore The Chinese Emotional Metaphor From A Cognitive Point Of View

As a common linguistic phenomenon, metaphor is closely linked with human cognition and thinking. Traditionally, metaphor has been regarded as figures of speech, while modern metaphor theory treats it as a cognitive phenomenon, a significant way of thinking. It is an activity which allows people to comprehend or explain the experience of another domain by virtue of that of a certain domain.Emotion and cognition interact with and mutually affect each other. The study of human emotions constitutes an essential part of human cognition. To describe them vividly, people usually express them in metaphorical terms. This paper attempts to conduct a cross—cultural research into conceptual metaphors of emotion from the perspective of cognition, and compare, contrast and analyze Chinese and English emotion metaphors of happiness, anger, sadness, fear and love. Firstly, this paper defines and classifies metaphor, then introduces the historical and contemporary conditions of metaphor studies both in China and in the West and then explains its working mechanism and interprets emotive concepts from the perspective of metaphor. Besides, this paper compares and contrasts English and Chinese conceptual metaphors of emotion about happiness, anger, sadness, fear and love and explores the origin of the similarities and dissimilarities. Finally, this paper discusses the significance of the study of emotion metaphor theories.In contrast with traditional viewpoints of metaphor, this paper makes a relatively and detailed exposition on emotion metaphors from the perspective of cognition. This research reinforces and develops some theories of the contemporary cognitive approach to metaphor: conceptual metaphor is characterized by cognitive universality and cultural diversity.