Contrastive Study Of The Conceptual Metaphor Of GUO JIA In Chinese And SNC In American English

As an important category in sociology, GUO JIA is the bridge between the abstract concept of society and politics to the relatively concrete concept of regime, territory and people. Being the most important form of existence and promoter of human society, the concept of GUO JIA, which is also the product of human cognition and experience, is not remote from our everyday life at all. Conceptual metaphor, as the most important theory of cognitive linguistics, is based on the summary of human cognitive rules and it also exerts great guiding effect upon the human cognition. The study of this thesis adopts the conceptual metaphor theory from cognitive linguistics to analyze the concept of GUOJIA. After the contrastive study of their linguistic expressions about the concept of GUO JIA, the differences of cognitive modes between Chinese and American people were revealed.The thesis takes the metaphorical expressions about the concept of GUOJIA from both Chinese (from the CCL corpus) and American English (from COCA corpus) as the data for the contrastive study. With the guidance of the five-step procedure of metaphor identification by Steen, the thesis identifies the metaphorical expressions about GUO JIA from CCL and COCA. And then with the aid of Lakoffs conceptual metaphor theory, the thesis analyzed the conceptual mappings between the source domains and the target domain, which led to the conceptual metaphors about GUO JIA in Chinese and American English. In Chinese, we tend to use the domains of Human, Animal, Plant, Container, Building, Machine and Natural forces as the source domains for our conceptualization of GUO JIA, while in American English, they tend to use Human, Plant, Building Machine and Business firm as the source domain.The systematic contrastive analysis of the conceptual metaphors about GUO JIA in Chinese and SNC in American English eventually leads to the following conclusions:1. The conceptual metaphor of GUOJIA, in nature, is a systematic conceptual mapping from the concrete concept in the world to the abstract concept of GUO JIA. The different conceptual metaphor adopted different objects as the source domains to conceptualize the different elements of GUO JIA (Regime, Territory and People), with different mapping focuses respectively.2. Because of the similar experience basis of human beings, Chinese and American people share some similar source domains, however, within these similar source domains, the expressions and images of the Chinese and American expressions are different, such as the Family metaphor and the Machine metaphor.3. Due to the social cultural differences, Chinese and American people also have their cultural-specific source domains, such as Natural force in Chinese and Business firm in American English, which reveals the cultural differences of the two.4. The conceptual metaphors of GUO JIA have cognitive function and social-cultural functions, which will subconsciously influence people’s ideology and behaviors, and they can also exert some effects on the design and implementation of policies.The systematic contrastive study of the metaphorical expressions of GUO JIA in Chinese and SNC in American English will help improve our understanding of the functions of the conceptual metaphors of GUO JIA in the two societies. What’s more, the study can also justify the universality and nationality of metaphor, and the applicability of this theory in other domains. The study can also facilitate our understanding about the difference of the conceptualization and function mechanisms of GUO JIA in Chinese and SNC in American English, which will be of some benefit to the cross-cultural communication and cooperation between them and it will eventually devote to the understanding of the different cognitive modes of human beings.