A Cognitive Approach To Chinese Metaphors With"Eating"

Eating plays an important role in our daily life, especially for Chinese people. Chinese have many idioms and proverbs to describe their eating experience. Phrases related to eating are very general and they have extensive meanings. Many of the phrases are metaphor of "吃"(chi, means eating)。Metaphor is an important way of thinking. The understanding of metaphor goes through a continuously changing process. Traditional view puts metaphor as a rhetorical phenomenon and a literature technique, while the modern cognitive linguists think that metaphor is a fundamentally cognitive phenomenon. Two important proponents of cognitive linguistics are Lakoff and Johnson. They put out that metaphor is a kind of mapping from the source domain to the target domain. It is used to organize our cognitive concept in our mind.The Chinese word "吃"(eating) has close relationship with metaphor. Eating metaphor is universal in Chinese. By analyzing the metaphorical phrases of eating collected from PKU and dictionaries, this paper makes a research on these phrases and tries to analyze them from the perspective of cognitive linguistic. Based on Qian Jianchen’s analysis of eating metaphor, this paper tries to study the cognitive mechanism of eating metaphor by collecting, classifying and rearranging these phrases. It puts forward a clearer eating metaphor, namely, feeling is eating. This paper tries to explain it from three aspects:the way of feeling is the way of eating, the classification of feeling is the classification of eating and the senser of feeling is the actor of eating. Firstly, synesthesia plays an important role in the conduct of eating metaphor. It is the basis to use eating metaphor to express our other feelings. The organs we use to feel and we use to eat are closely related. Eating and feeling are often involved in the sense organs (nose, mouth, eyes, ears, hand). That is one of the basses for people to use eating metaphor to express feelings. Analysis finds that eating metaphors are often used to express the feeling of seeing, the feeling of tasting and the feeling of smelling, but they are relatively less used to express the feeling of touching and the feeling of hearing. Secondly, the classification of feeling and the classification of eating also have close relationship. On the basis of emotion, human feeling can be classified into negative feeling, positive feeling and neutral feeling. Based on different foods we eat, we may classify them into delicious food, bad food and food that seems just fine, thus these foods arouse our different feelings. By analyzing these eating metaphor, it is found that most of eating metaphors are used to express the negative feeling, a few of them are used to express positive feeling and using them to express neutral feeling is the least. What is more, there is a connection between the senser of feeling and the actor of eating. According to the statistic we collected, the analysis suggests that human beings are the main actor and senser of eating metaphor, while animals take only11%in examples. Meanwhile, in order to make a comprehensive study of eating metaphor, this paper also mentions some eating metaphor that are used to express one particular feeling, such as suffering is eating, depending is eating and acceptance is eating.