A Cognitive Approach To Expressions Of "Deep" In English And Shen In Chinese

Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) clearly expounds the ways of human cognition and their unique characteristics which underlie the language, while describing the metaphorical qualities of language. Due to the explanatory power, Conceptual Metaphor Theory has been widely applied to the analyses of various kinds of linguistic phenomena, among the dimensional expressions. Since all of our actions take place in space, space domain is accepted as the most basic domain in cognition. The study shows that people comprehend the world through the spatial relationship between the objective space.and themselves. Thus, spatial metaphors can be employed to help people to understand and describe the abstract concepts such as time, extent, human mental states, social status, etc.Dimensional expressions are more often utilized to answer how-questions, instead of where-questions answered by spatial expressions. So they are gradable and manifest the spatial orientation through measurement. Western researches on dimensional words can be traced back to Bierwisch’s study in 1967 while Chinese scholars began their research relatively much later. Nowadays the cognitive research on the certain dimensional word among the previous studies is merely confined to the Chinese language. What’s more, the research materials and data are still insufficient, and also the research is far from systematic, hence requiring further improvement and perfection.This thesis, adopting Conceptual Metaphor Theory, including Image Schema Theory, attempts to explore the features and the metaphorical qualities that the dimensional expressions of "deep" in English and its Chinese counterpart shen(深) exhibit, and discover the characteristics of human cognition hidden in these linguistic expressions. On the basis of the previous relevant studies, the present research carries out a comparative analysis of dimensional expressions of "deep" in English and shen(深) in Chinese, in the hope of displaying the commonalities and differences of human cognition which run through the process of conceptual projection between the source domain and the target domain in two distinct languages. Furthermore, in order to explain the features and working mechanisms of conceptual metaphor of Chinese and English dimensional expressions, the thesis employs the methods of qualitative description and explanation, and the quantitative and comparative analyses to explore the similarities and differences of metaphorical extensions of "deep" in English and shen(深) in Chinese, which is carried out largely on the basis of the rich data collected from corpora, dictionaries and the Internet. Abundant research materials and data are helpful to testify the reliability and explanatory power of the cognitive approach to metaphor, to broaden the research fields and angles on which cognitive universality and cultural variations depend across languages, to supplement the corpus-based approach to the cognitive study in the present thesis that is unmatched by many previous studies in this respect and also enhance the credibility of our analyses.The present research indicates that, in terms of such dimensional expressions in both Chinese and English, the target domains projected in the conceptual metaphor can be classified into the following five types: TIME domain, COLOR domain, HUMAN BODY domain, HUMAN MENTAL STATES domain, and SOCIAL STATUS domain, which constitute a complete system. By investigating metaphorical extensions of "deep" and shen(深), the research also concludes that the image-schematic structures of both DEEP and SHEN can be mapped onto the five target domains mentioned above; however, the five domains are arranged in somewhat different orders of frequency in English and Chinese because of culture differences.