| The last two decades has seen the breakthrough of metaphor study. With thedevelopment of linguistics especially cognitive linguistics, people realize thatmetaphor is not only a decoration or a poetical ornament for language, it is also a wayof thinking, a form of cognition, through which we understand new things or concepts.The seminal book Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) symbolizedthat the study of metaphor has entered a brand new era—a cognitive approach tometaphor study. Besides Lakoff and Johnson, there was another linguist whoconducted a systematic study of metaphor under the framework of cognitivelinguistics. That was G. Fauconnier. He supplemented and improved the Lakoff’smapping theory, and came up with a new theory—Conceptual integration theory.In this paper, the author tries to contribute to the present body metaphor researchfield by conducting a contrastive study on body metaphors concerning three“conscious” body terms—HEATR, HEAD, and BRAIN from cognitive approach toexplore the similarities and differences of metaphorical modes in Chinese and English.In this thesis, the study is based on two online corpora: PKU-CCL-Corpus for Chinesedata and COCA for English data. HEATR, HEAD, and BRAIN are entered as keywords to collect samples with metaphorical expressions.100samples for each keywords. In total,600sentences are drawn from the two corpora:300Chinese sentencesand300English sentences. The collected data are classified into three types accordingto different mapping models:1) mapping from body domain to non-body domain;2)mapping from non-body domain to body domain;3) mapping between different bodyterms. The percentage of each type will be worked out, which will make it moreconvenient and persuasive to make comparison and contrast between Chinese andEnglish data. Their different mapping models, metaphorical modes and some other special features will be discussed.Through collection and analysis of the data, it can be concluded that among thethree mapping models, the similarities mainly lie in the first type while the differencesare shown in the second and third types. For differences, in mapping from non-bodydomain to body domain, the source domain in Chinese has more types ofsub-categories, which reflects the diversity of the metaphorical modes in Chinese.The distribution of its sub-categories in Chinese is more balanced than that in English.As for mapping between two different body terms, almost no samples can be found inEnglish. We can say this kind of mapping model is absent in English. It once againproves that Chinese is more diversified and richer in metaphorical modes for bodymetaphors. For similarities, the mapping from body domain to non-body domain hassimilar distribution in Chinese and English. As for mapping from non-body domain tobody domain, many sub-categories of source domain are corresponding in Chineseand English and their distribution are similar in general. In all, the similarities aremore prominent than differences. Their similarities result from the cognitiveuniversality while the differences come from the cultural particularity. |
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