Thinking Of The Similarities And Differences Between English And Chinese, From The Human Body Metaphor

Traditionally, metaphor has been studied by scholars in the fields of rhetoric and linguistics. Metaphor is only envisaged as a deviation of ordinary language and a rhetorical or poetic device. While modern metaphor is regarded as a cognitive and a significant way of thinking, which is an activity of cognition allowing people to comprehend or explain the experience of another domain by virtue of that of a certain domain. From the very beginning, human beings perceive and express the objective world by means of human body metaphor, which is the universal mode of thinking for primitive men. The research on human body metaphor is still insufficient made by modern metaphor theory, though some Chinese scholars have made the contrastive study of body metaphors between English and Chinese, few scholars explain the differences between the two languages from the aspect of culture. Hence, the thesis aims at probing into the problem by discussing the philosophic foundation of the contrastive study. Moreover, it will mainly focus on the examples of body metaphors in English and Chinese in order to analyze the similarities and differences which make body metaphors vary in language use and thoughts. The research discovers that English and Chinese share many main body metaphors and body metonymies. These similarities strongly support the claim that there exists cognitive universality as well as linguistic universality for some basic bodily experiences, the physiological structure and the way of thinking in the light of human body should be common among human beings. Meanwhile, English and Chinese differ from each other in some other metaphors. The differences reflect cultural relativity of conceptual differences. The thesis tries to account for these differences from five aspects: geographical environment, point for observation or analysis, language culture, traditional culture, values.The study of similarities and differences of body metaphor in English and Chinese, to a certain degree, is the supplement of the body metaphor study. It proves that human body plays an important part in language use and thoughts. In addition, this research will be helpful to the vocabulary teaching in English and Chinese.