| The present research focuses on a special figure of speech in Chinese and English love poems: transferred epithet—the modifier which is originally used to modify one object is transferred to the other object. The peculiarity of transferred epithet lies in its unique effect of expression and artistic charm. Traditional rhetoric takes transferred epithet as a special figure of speech, and most previous domestic studies focus mainly on its definition, classification, pragmatic or semantic analysis, functions, translation methods, understanding mechanism and so on. Few scholars make a contrastive study on what similarities and differences are in the aspect of cognitive mechanism of Chinese and English transferred epithet from the cognitive perspective, and whether there exist difficulties in the process of meaning construction of the two different languages, except for Zhu Yongling(2010) who makes a comparative study on the generative mechanism of Chinese and English transferred epithet based on the theory of inheritance between connotation and denotation.To fill these gaps and deficiencies of the previous studies, the present thesis initiates a contrastive study of transferred epithet between Chinese and English love poems based on the three mappings, namely, projection mapping, pragmatic function mapping and schema mapping and four types of integration networks, namely, simplex networks, mirror networks, single-scope networks and double-scope networks of Conceptual Integration Theory. The research questions are explored:(1) What are the similarities and differences between transferred epithet in Chinese and English love poems in cognitive mechanism? What are the causes for these similarities and differences?(2) Can all three mappings and four types of integration networks appear in the meaning construction mechanism of transferred epithet in English and Chinese love poems?Based on the linguistic facts, both quantitative approach and qualitative approach will be adopted in the present thesis, and comparative study as well. The Chinese materials and English materials used in this research are love poems, ranging from the late 19 th century to the early 20 th century. The authentic examples of transferred epithets between Chinese and English are collected from 100 Chinese love poems and 100 English love poems, delimiting the case scope of this research to reduce the arbitrariness and subjectivity of corpus selection, so that the research conclusion is more general and applicable.On the other hand, according to the attribute salience, the author revisits the transferred epithet in Chinese and English love poems in order to make the following analysis logical and rational. Based on the previous achievements, the author reclassifies the transferred epithets into there kinds: emotional transferred epithet, unemotional transferred epithet and transferred epithet of external objects. Through statistics and analysis, the author finds that there are two sub-types in each kind of transferred epithet, and the frequency of transferred epithet in the two languages is almost at the same level, which proves that transferred epithet can go beyond the language barriers and be widespread in Chinese and English languages.Based on the above finding, the author introduces the features of Chinese transferred epithet and English transferred epithet respectively, and randomly chooses six sub-classes of transferred epithets in Chinese and English love poems to give an illustration to their cognitive mechanisms based on Conceptual Integration Theory, whose detailed cognitive processes are presented by figures. After analyzing the similarities and differences between them, the author finds that there are no obvious differences in cognitive mechanisms between Chinese transferred epithet and English transferred epithet in complexity. People are more likely to use the same cognitive mechanism to construct transferred epithet. In the aspect of structure, Chinese transferred epithet and English transferred epithet all have some similar expressing manners and structures. In the aspect of attribute transference, the direction of transference starting from human in both Chinese and English transferred epithet accounts for the largest proportion, which proves that Chinese and English people like to observe and understand the world from the points of themselves. All of these similarities are decided by human beings’ universal cognitive principles. Meanwhile, due to the cultural differences of eastern and western countries, the semantic relation of Chinese transferred epithet mainly focuses on modifying relation and subject-predicate relation, while the semantic relation of English transferred epithet is more complex, including parallel relation, cause-and-effect relation and modifying relation.It is hoped that this contrastive research not only is helpful for cross-cultural communication, but also could help people obtain a deeper understanding of CIT, and have a better understanding of the meaning construction mechanism of Chinese and English transferred epithet, as well as understand and appreciate more clearly how the author uses transferred epithets in the texts. |
