The Metaphorical Extensions Of ’up And Down’in English And Chinese

This paper reports a comparative study of ’UP’,’DOWN’ both in Chinese and English interms of spatial metaphor. The study is focused on the orientational metaphor within thedomain of conceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980,2003). Lakoffand Johnson (1980,2003) claim that metaphor should be upgraded from the level of wordsand sentences to the level of thinking and advocate that people should not only learn how touse metaphorical languages but also learn how to think metaphorically. In essence, conceptualmetaphor means the mapping from the concrete source domain to the abstract target domain.In this paper it is hypothesized that the four concrete spatial concepts ’SHANG’,’XIA’ and’UP’,’DOWN’ are mapped onto the abstract target domains ’QUANTITY’,’SOCIALHIERARCHY’,’TIME’,’SCOPE’,’EXTENT’,’STATES’. This hypothesis has beendeveloped from the research findings of Yu (1996), Lan (2003), Xiao (2008) that commonfeatures of metaphorical expression exist between different languages.Lakoff (1993) studied the relationship between metaphor and cognition theoretically buthe did not do any empirical scientific research, so people are not totally convinced by thetheory. Yu (1996) did an empirical study by using dictionaries to justify the existence ofcommon metaphorical system between Chinese and English in terms of orientationalmetaphors. But the language materials from dictionaries cannot be taken as the dailylanguages and can’t accurately reflect the real thinking process. Lan (2003) later made acomprehensively comparative study about ’UP’,’DOWN’ and ’SHANG’,’XIA’ in terms oforientational metaphor based on the findings of Yu (1996). And Lan (2003) has made abreakthrough in the aspect of methodology and made use of corpus-based researchmethodology. But at that time corpus-based study was not in the mainstream, so it isnecessary to validate her findings after a few years. The study of Xiao(2008) was also basedon the findings of the authors we just mentioned above and used the paralleled corpus of theDream of Red Chamber to carry out the comparative study between ’SHANG’,’XIA’ and’UP’,’DOWN’ in terms of spatial metaphor from the perspective of translation. But herconclusion is beyond all expectations: only the domain of ’SOCIAL HIERARCHY’ otherthan other domains coexists between Chinese and English. It is worth mentioning that thispaper is the synthesis of all the research findings we have mentioned above and choosesBeijing Spoken Corpus Query System and the American Contemporary English Corpus tovalidate the findings of Yu (1996), Lan (2003) and Xiao (2008), hoping that this paper canmake a contribution to justifying the hypothesis proposed by Lakoff (2003) that ’commonmetaphor system exists between different languages’.Through statistical analysis, the main findings are:(1) The metaphorical extensions about ’SHANG’,’XIA’ and ’UP’,’DOWN’ found by Lan(2003) all appeared in this study. Andwhat is similar to the study of Lan (2003) is that ’SCOPE’ domain ranks the first place in allthe four spatial concepts.(2) The metaphorical extensions ’ANGRY IS SHANG/UP’,’CALMNESS IS DOWN/XIA’,’HAPPY IS SHANG/UP’,’SAD IS XIA/DOWN’ identifiedby Yu (1996) only appeared in ’UP’ and ’DOWN’. At the same time, the domain of’CONTENT’ found by Xiao (2008) appeared sparklingly in the four spatial concepts except’XIA’ and their proportions were too small.(3) The metaphorical extension of ’CONTENT’found only in Chinese by Xiao (2008) all ranked well in the four spatial concepts in this study,which confutates the conclusion made by Xiao (2008).(4) In this study, this author also found’EXTENT’ which ranked well in ’SHANG’,’XIA’ and’UP’,’DOWN’ and this metaphoricalextension didn’t appear in other studies.(5) The extensions from verticality to horizontalityabout ’SHANG’,’XIA’ and ’UP’,’DOWN’ identified by Lan (2003) all appeared in this studyalthough there are some subtle differences. At the same time, this author also found somesub-domains which never appeared in other studies, for example:’WESTWARD IS SHANG’,’SOUTHWARD IS XIA’,’GOING TO SOMEWHERE IS UP’,’EASTWARD IS DOWN’etc.Through this study we can get some implications:(1) Human being should abandon thetraditional interpretation of metaphor in line with Aristotle and Chomsky that metaphor is justregarded as a kind of rhetoric device and should learn how to think metaphorically.(2) Peopleshould also understand something abstract and unfamiliar by means of concrete concepts, likeour daily experience or spatial concepts, which is in accordance with the essence ofconceptual metaphor theory proposed by Lakoff.(3) As second language learners, we can’tsolely learn target languages from the perspective of superficial level, like memorizing thevocabulary and imitating the pronunciation of the target language but upgrade our learningtarget to the level of thinking, in other words, we should try our best to get used to theirthinking pattern and integrate into the culture of our target languages, identifying thesimilarties and differences between the foreign cultures and our own culture and finding thereason why these phenomena can occur.