A Contrastive Study Of Conceptual Metaphors In Chinese And English Movie Reviews

In1980, Lakoff and Johnson published “metaphors we live by”, and put forward theconceptual metaphor theory, which is by far one of the most influential metaphor theories.Since then, the scope of metaphor study is no longer limited to traditional rhetorical study, andwhat is more is that they boldly put forward an argument that metaphor is everywhere, notonly exists in language, but also exists in our thought and action. In other words, our thinkingis essentially metaphorical concept. Since then, this theory got the attention of many scholars,and was constantly proved and supplemented. This thesis, based on the analysis of Chineseand English movie reviews, aims at finding out the metaphors and their similarities anddifferences, and wish to delve into the reasons behind.Language influences and reflects people’s thinking process, thus to some extent people’sattitude towards things can also be reflected in language, especially in metaphoricalexpressions. This article, from the critical perspective, carries out the analysis, to understandthe different attitudes between Chinese and English movie reviewers towards the same movie.In this paper, the author selected20Chinese movie reviews and20English movie reviews of20movies to set up two corpora as the basis of analyses.Through a thorough investigation and careful contrastive analysis of conceptualmetaphors in the two corpora, the main results are as follows:First of all, there are12kinds of conceptual metaphors in the Chinese corpus, and13kinds of conceptual metaphors in the English corpus, which illustrates that the application ofconceptual metaphor in Chinese language is as wide as that is in English.Secondly，there are eight categories of conceptual metaphor existing in both corpora,such as journey metaphor and human metaphor, etc. This indicates the cultural coherence ofconceptual metaphor.What is more is that some conceptual metaphors are found in only one corpus, such asfood metaphor and family metaphor in the Chinese corpus and sports metaphor in the Englishcorpus. In addition, there are some differences in the usage of the same metaphor in different corpora. The cultural background and other causes of this phenomenon are discussed in thisthesis.All in all, this thesis, through the contrastive analysis of conceptual metaphors in theChinese and English movie reviews, once again proved the universality of conceptualmetaphors, mainly coming from the human experience and cognition of the world; Secondly,it proves that the differences between the conceptual metaphors in the two corpora lie in therespective cultural specifications.The author hopes that this thesis can make contribution to the study of metaphor andhelp to better understand the Chinese and American culture.