A Contrastive Study Of Orientational Metaphors Of Emotion Words Between English And Chinese

Emotion, as one of the most pervasive and basic aspects of human experience, has always been the focus of cognitive linguistics. Human being’s emotions are rich and varied, such as happiness, anger, sadness, fear and so forth. Moreover, these emotions are abstract and hard to clarify. Therefore, people often conceptualize them in a metaphorical way.This study is aimed at analyzing emotion metaphors in English and Chinese in reference to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory.More specifically,the present study presents a contrastive analysis on the orientational metaphors of emotions between English and Chinese,making a thorough inquiry about the similarities and differences between them on the basis of commonness of bodily experience and cultural diversities.The data for the present study originate from the following four dictionaries:Roget’s International Thesaurus,A Dictionary of American Idioms,A Dictionary of Metaphors at Home and Abroad(《中外比喻词典》)and A Classified Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese(《现代汉语分类词典》).Each provides us with a rich collection of metaphors in the two languages.Two important results can be obtained from a systematic analysis of the data. Firstly, as shown in this study, English and Chinese share both similarities and differences in their conceptualization of emotions. The similarities can be attributed to the common human bodily experiences while the differences can be explained by resorting to the different cultural background or models and different natural or physical environments, such as different customs, geographic environments, diverse religious beliefs and so forth.Secondly, the widespread claim POSITIVE IS UP, NEGATIVE IS DOWN is oversimplified. And there is a subtle relationship between orientational metaphors of emotions and human physiological reaction. Numerous English and Chinese examples reveal that the upward and downward orientation of emotion metaphors should be defined by human beings’ physiological reaction, not just by the positive or negative feature of the emotion word. In other words, if an emotion lead a human body to respond with hyperactive physiological reactions(e.g. the blood pressure increases, faster blood flow rate and faster heart rate), the orientational metaphors used to describe the emotion tends to be upward. By contrast, if an emotion causes a human body to respond with depressed physiological reactions(e.g. the falling of blood pressure, lower blood flow and lower heart rate), the orientational metaphors used to describe the emotion is likely to be downward. Namely, ―physiological arousal is up, physiological depression is down.‖Grounded on conceptual metaphor theory of cognitive linguistics, this study has made a rather comprehensive and systematic study on orientational metaphors of emotion words in English and Chinese. The findings of this comparative study are expected to contribute to the understanding of human cognitive mechanism or the means that people employ to express their emotions.