A Contrastive Study Of Metaphors About Female In Chinese And English

Metaphor has been one of the hottest topics in linguistic studies. Traditionalstudies on metaphor basically are largely conducted from philosophical and rhetoricalperspectives. In that way, metaphor is treated as a figure of speech or a device for therhetorical effect on the words level, not on the discourse level. In1980, the bookMetaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson was published and it broughtabout the cognitive approach to metaphor. The two scholars claimed that metaphor isnot only a figure of speech, but also a way of thinking and a means of cognition.Meanwhile, as the main part of social members, women are the focus of manyliterary works. Quiet a lot of studies about women are mainly analyzed from theoriesof feminist and theories of feminist literature. But the study on metaphors aboutfemale is not so sufficient as the study on metaphors. Most of the studies on metaphorabout female are conducted from some poems or novels. There is still some room totalk about the metaphor of woman under the corpus-based analysis.This corpus-based study compares and contrasts the similarities and differencesof metaphors about female between English and Chinese based conceptual metaphortheory in cognitive linguistics. And the reasons for the similarities and differences arealso analyzed. The approach adopted here is a qualitative corpus-based study with aquantitative and interpretative analysis. Here English data are mainly collected fromthe Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the Chinese data mainlyfrom the Contemporary Chinese Language (CCL). Some typical expressions frominternet and books are also resorted to. With the corpus data, the method ofcontrastive analysis will be used to analyze metaphors about female in two languages.The conceptual metaphors involving women are generally classified into five groups:WOMAN IS ANIMAL, WOMAN IS PLANT, WOMAN IS THING, WOMAN IS FOOD, and other metaphors on female. This study tries to analyze the metaphorsabout female from these five metaphorical concepts and find their similarities anddifferences between English and Chinese. Then reasons for the similarities anddifferences in metaphor about female in two languages are revealed.By the contrastive analysis, it is not difficult to find that the source domains ofmetaphor about female in two languages have some similarities and differences. Thesame source domain is based on the similar experiential grounding and cognitivepatterns, as well as the female culture during a specific time period, while thedifferent domains result from different cultures, religions and aesthetics. Meanwhile,we can also notice that many metaphors about female tend to be used negatively.Apart from the compliment of women’s beauty, other metaphorical expressions aboutwomen are negative words, which reflects women’s low social status.