A Comparative Study Of “Moon” Metaphors In Chinese And English Poems From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

Metaphor is a significant part in the studies of linguistics.Since Lakoff raised the cognitive approach of metaphor,the studies have turned to another direction as opposed to descriptions from the rhetorical perspective.Lakoff believes that metaphor relates to human's mental world,and it is a tool of understanding the world around us.This cognitive approach provides us with a new angle and idea of studying metaphor.As an important carrier of metaphor,the poems offer a lot of linguistic data to us for analyzing the application of Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT).And “moon”,a relatively familiar image in Chinese and English poems,provides various imaginations for the poets since it has a changeable image.So that,“moon” in different poems is metaphorized into different things.In the previous studies,many of the researchers focus on moon metaphors in Chinese poems and they mainly remain in the aesthetic level rather than in a cognitive view.Studies on moon metaphors in English poems are rather less,let alone comparative ones of two languages.Therefore,the present study collects 30 poems for each with moon metaphors from Detailed Analysis of Three Hundred Tang Poems and Appreciation of British Poetry,and tries to do a comparative study in the “moon metaphors” in two kinds of poems from the cognitive view.On the basis of research objective and purpose,the author raises three research questions1)What are the “moon” metaphors in these 60 poems?2)What are the similarities and differences between these metaphors?3)What are the motivations behind these similarities and differences?After analyzing the collected data,the author discusses these metaphors in detail with the discussion group.According to their different target domains,the moon metaphors are categorized into several groups.Furthermore,the author compares the target domains,finds out and analyzes their similarities and differences,and draws the following conclusions:Firstly,in the Chinese poem selected,“moon” is metaphorized to “Love”,“Beauty of Woman”,“Loneliness”,“Missing”,“Noble Characters”,and “Recalling History”,while in the English ones,“moon” is compared to “Love”,“Female”,“Positive things”,“Death”,“Constantly Changing”,and “Negative things”.Secondly,both Chinese and English poets use “moon” to represent “Love” in their poems,and they also share similar target domain---“Woman”.As for the differences between them,there are two general distinctions.Moon metaphors in Chinese poems are always derived from human's emotion or experience,while ones in English poems focus on moon's features or the natural law.Also,in Chinese ancient poems,moon is always used to describe the beautiful things,but in English ones,moon is a “sometimes good sometimes bad” role.Thirdly,the motivations behind these similarities and differences are divided into two categories: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.Extrinsic motivations come from the moon's features and the natural law,and the intrinsic ones are mainly about the poets' social and cultural background and their mental environment.