A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On FRONT/BACK Metaphors In English And Chinese

Metaphor study has been a hot subject for many scholars. There are two periods of metaphor studying in history:the first is traditional metaphor study and the second is modern metaphor study. In the first period, scholars and linguists view metaphors as a figure of speech. Lakoff & Johnson (1980) published the book Metaphors We Live By in which they introduce the theory of conceptual metaphor and illustrate essence of metaphor and its working mechanism, which marks the new period of metaphor study. Conceptual system of human beings is metaphorical by itself.Among those orientational words used in our everyday life, we can find that "front/back" have a relatively high frequency in English and Chinese. This thesis aims at conducting a corpus-based study on English and Chinese FRONT/BACK metaphors. By applying the theory of conceptual metaphors, this thesis tries to answer the following research questions:1. Are FRONT/BACK metaphors widely used in English and Chinese? In which language FRONT/BACK metaphors are more universal?2. What is the working mechanism of FRONT/BACK metaphors?3. Are there any similarities and differences between English and Chinese FRONT/BACK metaphors? What are they? What are the potential causes for their similarities or differences?To answer these research questions, the author first picks out 4000 samples with "qian/hou" expressions in CCL and 6216 samples with the meanings of "front/back" in BNC through random sampling method. After collecting the data, the author presents metaphorical expressions of "front/back" in the two languages, reveals the working mechanism of cross-domain mappings and explores the similarities and differences between English and Chinese FRONT/BACK metaphors and the causes of their similarities and differences. The data for the study are from the two powerful corpora:the English data is from British National Corpus (BNC) and the Chinese one comes from Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL), Peking University. Through classifying, making comparisons and analyzing a variety of linguistic data of "front/back", we find that:(1) The FRONT/BACK metaphors are pervasive both in English and in Chinese and metaphors of FRONT/BACK are mainly used in three domains:time domain, condition domain and social relation and status domain; (2) In each domain English and Chinese FRONT/BACK metaphors share some similarities and have their own specific individualities; (3) The reasons for their similarities are ascribed to the human beings’common ability of perception and cognition and shared bodily experience, and the reasons for their differences are attributed to different cultures, different religions and beliefs, different social consciousness and values and different social relations and customs.After analyzing the results of the thesis, some implications in inter-cultural communication and translation practices are discussed, some limitations of the study are raised and suggestions for further studies in this field are given.