The Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphor Between Chinese And English

Metaphor has been concerned too much from Aristotle times. People have done alot of research on it. At first, it was generally thought as just one of the rhetoricaldevices commonly used in the literary works. Since the1970s, traditional points ofview on metaphor have been broken through and some preliminary study in differentfields began to draw people’s attention. The metaphor is no longer a simple linguisticphenomenon; it is a way of human thinking, which has a deep-rooted relationship withcognition. The book Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff&Johnson in1980hasopened a new chapter in the study of metaphor. Fruitful results have been achieved inrecent years; nevertheless, the research only stays in vocabulary and syntax. Thecontinuous development of text linguistics provides a new perspective for the study ofconceptual metaphor. The development and improvement of systemic and functionallinguistics brings conceptual metaphor with a new awareness. This paper based onconceptual metaphor attempts to reveal the similarities and differences in theChinese-English discourse from Cognitive Grammar and Systemic Functionalperspective.This paper consists of5chapters. The first chapter initially begins with the purposeof this study, which puts conceptual metaphor theory on Chinese and Englisheconomic discourse, identifying the similarities and differences of the cognitiveinformation transmission from cognitive grammar and systemic functional grammarand analyzing the different cognitive and contracture mode on the economic discoursefrom distinct cognitive mode in different peoples. Then the methodologies is putforward, take comparative analysis, interdisciplinary, description and interpretationmethods for example. The second chapter firstly points out the achievements andshortcomings of former results, then propose the theory significance and practicalsignificance in the comparative study of the Chinese and English economic discourse.The third chapter focuses first on definition, classification, philosophical foundation,working mechanism, defined standards and embodied form of conceptual metaphor,followed by the methodology adopted in this paper: Cognitive Grammar and Systemic and Functional Grammar, especially introducing Theme theory of Halliday andinformation wave theory of Martin. Finally it makes a brief description for thecollected corpus. The fourth chapter defines conceptual metaphor in50Chineseeconomic discourse and50English economic discourse respectively, and gets the warmetaphor through contrastive analysis and do the Chinese and English comparison atlast. Secondly select a corpus from the corpus of Chinese-English war metaphordiscourse separately analyzing the metaphor type, metaphorical coherence,metaphorical reasoning, the central idea from cognitive theory and analyzing theThematic classification and the macro-new information from discourse functionanalysis, and comes to the conclusion. This chapter tends to give a macroscopic andmicroscopic view of the similarities and differences in the Chinese-English discoursefrom Cognitive Grammar and Systemic Functional perspective, and tries to analyzethe reasons behind this phenomenon. The fifth chapter summarizes the results andsignificance of this research, and raised the prospect of future research.