The Formation And Interpretation Of The Metaphor Thought Is Food In Contemporary Chinese

Metaphor has been an object of study since Aristotle, but the unprecedented development of metaphors originates from the publication of The Metaphor We Live by (1980) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in the latter half of twentieth century. In that book, they give a detailed definition of conceptual metaphor from the cognitive perspective and talk about the functions of metaphor, as well as the mapping theory.Metaphor comes from human beings’embodied experiences, among which eating and thinking are the most common ones. Food is essential to human beings, and the ability to think distinguishes human beings from other lower creatures. Many scholars at home and abroad have analyzed the conceptual metaphor IDEA or THOUGHT IS FOOD across the years. They mainly focus on the analysis of "thought" metaphors,"food" metaphors, the mappings of IDEA or THOUGHT IS FOOD, the comparison between Chinese and English conceptual metaphor THOUGHT IS FOOD. Based on these scholars’previous studies, this article tries to explain the mappings of THOUGHT IS FOOD from source and target domain in a more comprehensive way, explore the roots of the conceptual metaphor and explain its metaphorical meaning.The thesis mainly devotes to the analysis of the conceptual metaphor THOUGHT IS FOOD in contemporary Chinese. All the data I employ comes from the online corpus, Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU. Eight proposition-schema are identified at work in our conceptualization:THE CONTAINER OF THOUGHT AS THE CONTAINER OF FOOD, THE CONTENT OF THOUGHT AS THE COMPOSITION OF DIET, THE QUALITY OF THOUGTH AS THE FLAVOR OF FOOD, THE FORMATION OF THOUGHT AS PREPARATION OF FOOD, THE ACCEPTANCE OF THOUGHT AS THE INTAKE OF FOOD, THE REJECTION OF THOUGHT AS THE REFUSAL OF FOOD, THE CONSIDERATION OF THOUGHT AS THE CHEWING OR TASTING OF FOOD and THE COMPREHENSION OF THOUGHT AS DIGESTION OF FOOD. This thesis also explores the roots of the emergence of THOUGHT IS FOOD metaphor from the cognitive, cultural and linguistic aspect. Finally, thesis tries to account for the metaphorical meaning of THOUGHT IS FOOD based on Richard’s and Black’s interaction theory, Lakoff s mapping theory, and Fauconnier’s blended space theory.