A Comparative Study Of Chinese&English Conceptual Metaphors Of Water

The study of metaphor, with a long history of almost2000years, has gone through a shift from the linguistic level to the cognitive level. Water, as one of the most familiar and ordinary things to human beings, plays a vital role in human cognition and conceptual systems, thus giving rise to a great variety of water metaphors. During the recent decades, unprecedented attention has been paid to the study of water metaphors by many scholars from the cognitive perspective. These studies, however, are by no means comprehensive or in-depth. Generally, most of them just focus on the linguistic description or cultural comparison of water metaphors, ignorant of the motivations for these metaphors and the roles metaphors play in shaping cultures.To make up for the deficiency of the previous studies, this thesis, within the framework of Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory, carries out a comparative study on water metaphors in English and Chinese exemplified by rich linguistic corpora, aiming to achieve the following objectives:(1) to make a comprehensive classification of water metaphors via Chinese and English corpus;(2) to summarize the universality and peculiarity of water metaphors in Chinese and English;(3) to probe into the underlying reasons accounting for the universality and peculiarity of the mappings of water metaphors in Chinese and English. To ensure the credibility and validity of linguistic data, the corpus-based approach is adopted in the study, by referring to such general corpus as COCA and CCL.The analysis of data collected yields the following findings:(1) Water metaphors are ubiquitous in both Chinese and English. Altogether20water metaphors are abstracted in this thesis, covering a wide range of fields, including ideology, social behavior, social relationship and so on.(2) All these metaphors, rather than independent or isolated, are systematically and coherently structured, thus providing us with a complete, consistent and comprehensive understanding of water.(3) Universality and peculiarity co-exist in water metaphors in Chinese and English, which can be attributed to the cultural-coherent property of metaphor. Similar water metaphors exist because metaphors are rooted in human cognition which is universal across cultures at the generic-level, while different water metaphors arise out of cultural variation (including different physical and natural environment, different world views, time views and religious beliefs in this thesis), which plays a vital role in constituting our understanding of the world and constraining the selection of metaphors.In spite of some limitations in this paper, it is of great theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, it confirms and enriches the conceptual metaphor theory. Practically, it casts new light on language teaching, cross-cultural communication and translation studies.