A Comparative Study Of Numeral Metaphors In English And Chinese From The Perspectives Of Cognitive Linguistics

The study of metaphor has a long history. About2000years ago,Aristotle defines metaphors as consisting in giving thing a name thatbelongs to something else in his The Theory of Rhetoric. From then on,metaphor has always been regarded as a figure of speech. Lakoff andJohnson (1980) pioneer a new way of modern study of metaphor withMetaphors We Live By. They put forward metaphor is not only a kind ofrhetoric means, but also a pattern of thinking—metaphorical conceptualsystem. Metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon in nature and helps usunderstand the world better.A numeral is an important part of language. On one hand, it hascounting function. On the other hand, it produces another meaning—cultural meaning on the basis of the original meaning as the result oflong-term use. From another point of view, numeral system, as an abstractcultural code system, is a leap in thought from one cognitive domain tothe other. In the previous cognitive domain, it is the numerologicalcharacteristics of ontology. In the latter cognitive domain, it is thecomplicated cultural connotation. In essence, people understand andexperience ideas of abstract domains through the familiar numeraldomain. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) propose the essence of metaphor is touse the experience of a familiar domain to understand the experience of an abstract domain (p.19). So numerals can also be regarded asconceptual metaphors.This thesis attempts to do a comparative study of English andChinese numeral metaphors from the perspective of cognitive linguisticsto explore the similarities and differences in English-Chinese numeralmetaphors, to find the answers to the research questions of this study andenrich our understanding of metaphor.This thesis will research the following questions:1. What are the similarities and differences between English andChinese numeral metaphors?2. What are the cognitive motivations of these similarities anddifferences?This study adopts the method of qualitative research to comparedifferent types of metaphorical expressions between English and Chinesenumerals to discover the hidden rules. The results indicate that thereindeed exist many similarities between English and Chinese numeralmetaphors. The motivations for this are human shared bodily experience,common numeral cognitive category and common image schemas. In thetrend of monolithic convergence, nevertheless, out of certain folk modelssuch as culture and history, there appear characteristic expressions,divergent in unity, different in agreement.This study applies the approach of integration of culture and cognition. It is expected to find cognitive motivations behind thecommonalities between English and Chinese numeral metaphors from theperspective of cognitive linguistics. It is people’s shared bodilyexperience that decides the inevitable commonalities between Englishand Chinese numeral metaphors. But metaphor is inevitably susceptibleto cultural influence. The different cultures of Chinese and English decidetheir differences. Shen Jiaxuan (2007) suggests people who researchforeign languages do more comparative studies of Chinese and foreignlanguages. On one hand, it serves for language teaching. On the otherhand, it can find commonalities of human language to explore the generalrules of human language and the differences of languages on the surface(p.25). So the study is useful to overcome the obstacle of communicationbetween English and Chinese and promote the mutual communicationand integration of English and Chinese cultures by comparing thedifferences between English and Chinese numeral metaphors andanalyzing the differences of English and Chinese cultures.