A Contrastive Study On Emotional Metaphors In English And Chinese

In1980, with the publication of The Metaphors We Live by, people began torealize that: metaphor is not only a rhetoric device, which decorates our language inpoems, dramas and other literature works, but also a cognitive ability of human being,which has a close relationship with human’s thinking and cognition. The metaphoricthinking relates to the mapping theory. In nature, there is always something that weknow first and other things follow them to know by the human being, and there arealso many things which are abstract and other things that are concrete. In other words,metaphor is using the known to know the unknown, using the concrete to know theabstract.Emotion is an abstract bodily experience in our daily lives. Although the fourbasic emotions “happiness, sadness, anger, fear” are inaccessible to touch and see, wecan still find thousands of expressions about them both in English and Chinese. It allresults from the metaphorization and conceptualization. From this point of view, wecan get a more systematic understanding of emotional metaphors. The expression ofour feeling closely relates to our direct bodily experience. And there are many othersource domains we can use to bring out our feelings, such as the weather, color and soon. But referring to how these source domains can successfully get mapped to thetarget domains, we still need to do more systematic research and analysis from themetaphoric perspective.The author mainly focuses on the analysis of the emotion metaphors in Englishand Chinese through conceptual metaphor. The conceptual metaphor can be classifiedas three different types: Orientational metaphor, Ontological metaphor, Structuralmetaphor. The thesis will try to achieve the goal of finding out the similarities anddifferences of the metaphor of ANGER, FEAR, HAPPINESS and SADNESS. Theauthor will first list out as many examples of English and Chinese metaphorical expression on emotion as possible, and then make an analysis of the examples, andgive the reasons for the similarities and differences. This will with no doubt help thecross-culture communication, reducing the misunderstanding. Meanwhile, theteaching, learning and translation work will also benefit from it.The thesis will be divided into six chapters: chapter one is introduction, chaptertwo is the literature review, chapter three is the theoretical foundation of the thesis,chapter four lists many examples and these examples will be contrastively analyzed inchapter five. The last chapter is the conclusion of the whole paper.