A Comparative Study On Metaphorical Uses Of Wind And Rain In English And Chinese

Metaphor is traditionally viewed as a figure of speech and a mere matter oflanguage. However, the latest research on cognitive linguistics has suggested thatmetaphors are not merely stylistic, but that they are cognitively important as well. InMetaphors We Live By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphors arepervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but also in thought and action.According to conceptual metaphor theory, the conceptual metaphors we have in ourlanguage are rooted in our bodily experience, which is called the experiential basis ofconceptual metaphors. The meaning and understanding of a metaphor are realizedthrough the mapping of two domains-the source domain and the target domain; thesource domain is typically more concrete than the other for the purpose ofunderstanding human concepts.Weather, one of the important natural phenomenon closely related to human’sdaily life, is often made use of to depict abstract situations man faced or explainhuman concepts metaphorically. The previous studies of weather metaphors tend tofocus on emotion area. This thesis is an attempt to make a comparative study onmetaphorical uses of wind and rain in English and Chinese on the basis of ConceptualMetaphor Theory. The target domains of the metaphorical expressions of wind andrain nearly cover every aspects of human’s daily life. The thesis is mainly aqualitative research. After identifying and analyzing the data collected from thedictionary and on-line corpora, the similarities and difference of the wind and rain inEnglish and Chinese are presented. Both in English and Chinese, wind’s threedifferent phases, including appearing, ongoing and disappearing, are mapped to thetarget domain. Similarly, three different real-life situations of before the rain, duringthe rain and after the rain in the source domain are used to talk about the targetconcepts which are irrelevant to the weather conditions. And most of the metaphoricaluses of wind and rain in the form of idiom are related to wind and rain’s fore,including the driving force and destructive force. The concept metaphor:CONDITIONS ARE WEATHER is shared by English and Chinese, though some of the surface representations of this metaphor are unique in each language, most ofwhich observed in this thesis are idioms that are situational or image-based metaphors;while a large proportion of the metaphorical expressions of wind and rain in the formof single word in both languages are ontological metaphors. BREATH IS WIND,GAS IN THE STOMACH/INTESTINES IS WIND and CONCEIT IS WIND areunique ontological metahpors in English, while STYLE/VIRTUE IS WIND, LOVE ISWIND and DISEASE IS WIND are unique in Chinese. Surface representations ofthese unique ontological metaphors in Chinese are absent in English, and vice versa.The reason for similarities of metaphorical uses of the weather term, wind and rain,in English and Chinese can be explained by the similar bodily experience of wind andrain shared by the English and the Chinese. As for the motivations for differences,different social–cultural experience, including physical environment (geography andclimate), social context (power relations), cultural context (traditional philosophy,concept of qi, and theory of Traditional Chinese Medicine), and differential memory(myth and historical events) is taken into account.