| People employ a lot of metaphors in their daily life. Traditionally, metaphor isonly a form of rhetorical device, a compressed simile, or considered as an ornament oflanguage. For a long time, metaphor has aroused many scholars’ interests fromvarious angles such as linguistics, philosophy， social science and psychology.Especially after1970s, the understanding of metaphor has been improved graduallywith the emergence of contemporary cognitive linguistics. Metaphor is viewed as animportant way of thinking, which influences the process of human cognition. Therehas been an increasing popularity that more and more scholars have done a largeamount of research on metaphor from the cognitive linguistic perspective. In reality,metaphor is a conceptualizing tool that touched upon perception. Man understands thesurrounding changing world by using this cognitive tool. Metaphor has actually gonebeyond a form of language and thus becomes a basic way in which man lives. As abasic cognitive structure, metaphor plays the role of understanding a relativelyabstract and intangible concept with the help of a rather detailed and concrete concept.In the contemporary metaphor theory, metaphor is viewed as a cognitive tool.This thesis will focus on love metaphor, because love is an important way ofunderstanding the outside world and express their innermost thoughts and feelings.The metaphorical expression of love is widespread both in human social life andspiritual life. The reasons why I choose love metaphor for comparison content are:Firstly, in all human emotional experience, love has the special status and importance.It is the most common and the most mysterious means of human’s emotion. Secondly,there are abundant love metaphors both in English and Chinese.This research deals with two questions:1. What are the similarities and differences of love metaphors in English andChinese?2. What are the causes of these similarities and differences? The research adopts qualitative and quantitative methods to study and concludedifferent expressive forms of love metaphors in order to find out the hidden regularity.And the results of this contrastive study of love metaphors turn out to be:1.There areabundant love metaphors in English and Chinese. Love is an abstract perpetualexperience and a feeling that beyond expression. It has plentiful content, thus to studylove concept systematically, we can study by means of metaphor.2. There exist manysimilar metaphors in English and Chinese metaphors, such as “Love is Unity”,“Loveis Fire” and so on. The reasons lie in the common psychological basis and bodilyexperience.3. English and Chinese have their own typical features for them to expresslove via metaphors. Different cultures and background knowledge are the origins ofcausing differences.Metaphors are everywhere in our life. So systematical study of love not only hastheoretical significances but also has important practical meanings. The study resultsare helpful for us to understand love metaphor better than before and then they canlead us to explore and experience the different cultures behind metaphors. Practically,we can deepen our understanding of metaphors from cognitive perspective throughthe analysis of English and Chinese love metaphors, which provides a platform tomaster the metaphorical expressions of love in both languages. In addition, exploringthe deep reasons for different expressions of love metaphors can help students tounderstand different national cultures. |
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