Russian And Chinese Space Value Judgment Metaphor

Metaphor is a very common phenomenon which plays a rather important role in people's lives. Cognitive linguistics believes that metaphor is not only a rhetorical device but also acts as a means to understand the world. During the process of cognition, spatial relationship is the basis. Through human beings'cognitive activities, the spatial relationship in objective world will become conceptualized and is consequently reflected in language forming the spatial relationship in it. In this process, there appear a lot of spatial metaphors. The words involving spatial relationship such as"up-down""before-after""left-right"are thus endowed with abundant metaphorical meanings. People use them to describe time, number, social relationship and value judgment, thus form different spatial metaphors concerning time, number, social relationship and value judgment respectively in language. Among these spatial metaphors, the one that can most directly express people's mind is the spatial metaphor involving value judgment since it is the expression of people's evaluation of the objective world and the extrinsic manifestation of people's interior world.Referring to the theories both in cognitive linguistics and cultural linguistics, this paper will focus on the comparison between the spatial metaphors concerning value judgment in Russian and those in Chinese reflected through using words like"up-down""before-after""left-right", hoping to deepen people's understanding the similarities and differences between Russian and Chinese in using spatial metaphors to express value judgment.The whole paper will be divided into four chapters:The first chapter: introduction, explaining the purpose, significance, object and content of this research. Besides, the current research results at home and abroad will also be introduced.The second chapter will focus on the introduction to concept and essence of metaphor from the following three aspects, namely rhetoric, cultural linguistics and cognitive linguistic The third chapter will illustrate the concept, essence and classification of spatial metaphor and give the definition of the spatial metaphor concerning value judgment.The fourth chapter is one of the most important parts of this paper. It will concentrate on the comparison between the usages of three groups of spatial words"up-down""before-after""left-right"in Russian and Chinese from the perspectives of expressive manner and semantic features, trying to find out both the similarities and differences between them.The fifth chapter is another important part of this paper. According to the conclusion drawn in the fourth chapter, this part tries to trace the root causes of the similarities and differences between the usage of spatial metaphor concerning value judgment in Russian and that in Chinese from four aspects, namely territory feature, religious belief, national character and mode of thinking with the theories of national culture.