An Image Schmatic Analysis Of The Moral Language In The Great Learning

In the field of cognitive linguistics, the image schema theory, as a part of doing research on cognition, plays a role in understanding the cross-domain mapping of images. Its theory provides a new reference point of view for the study on polysemy, semantic change, grammaticalization and the construction of metaphor. The image schema theory helps much in doing cognitive researches. However, most of the related studies are based on the collections of English materials but less on the Chinese data. The Great Learning(《大学章句》), based on one of the articles named Da Xue (“大学”) in Li Ji(《礼记》), is a modified version edited by Zhu Xi(朱熹) This work is greatly highlighted and studied by learners and scholars over centuries. With the help of searching the academic journals on CNKI and the related books in the library, great achievements of the studies on The Great Learning have been made. So far, the Chinese scholars primarily analyze the text from views of exegetics, philosophy, politics, education, ethics and so on. Comparatively, less studies have been made from the field of cognitive linguistics and inter-disciplines. The present thesis tries to apply the image schema theory from the works by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff (1987) to analyzing the moral language in The Great Learning. The thesis primarily aims at expounding the significant meaning of the image schema theory in the construction of metaphor and the meaning of the moral language. The thesis summarizes several ontological metaphors, which are widely found in the discourse of The Great Learning (such as VIRTUE IS AN ENTITY, HUMAN IS AN ENTITY, EMOTION IS HUMAN BEINGS and NATION IS FAMILY). The meanings of these metaphors are better constructed and understood through various image schemas, they are container schema, path schema, force schema, link schema and others. This thesis is not only an exploration of the extension of cognitive linguistic theory for interpreting the Chinese traditional classics, but also an attempt to better understand the Chinese traditional culture, especially the unique cognition and thought endowed in it. Upon the heritage of the excellent traditional thoughts of morality and ethics, particularly the aspects of self-cultivation and self-restraint, the present thesis has, to some degree, certain theoretical and practical significances in decoding the Chinese classics.