A Contrastive Study Of Chinese Orientational Words "Zuo/You" And Their English Counterparts From The Perspective Of Metaphor

Nowadays,Metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon,but also a cognitive phenomenon and an important source of creating new linguistic meaning as well.With the help of metaphor study,we can use a better way to describe abstract concepts.In recent years,the study of metaphor from the perspective view of cognitive linguistics has become the mainstream of the study of metaphor in the west.The western view of metaphor cognition holds that the process of metaphor is actually the projection from the source domain to the target domain,emphasizing the role of human cognition and human perception in the process of metaphor.In general,the domestic and foreign studies mainly focus on the comparison of Chinese and Western cultural meanings and the definition of part of speech;domestic studies on zuo and you are few,and a large number of works focus on other orientational words.A few studies on zuo and you also focus on the comparison of Chinese and English cultures.Some contrastive studies of Chinese and English spatial positional words involve some theories of cognitive linguistics,but the study only involves the display of corpus,without explanation and cognitive analysis.Although the theory of cognitive linguistics is relatively developed abroad.However,most scholars use cognitive linguistics theory to analyze the usage of other localizations,while the study of left,right is less.Therefore,it is necessary to make a comparative study of zuo/you and left/right from the perspective of lexical metaphor and grammatical metaphor.This paper takes the Chinese Modern Language Corpus of Peking University(CCL)and COCA Corpus of the United States as the corpus sources,and takes conceptual metaphor and grammatical metaphor as the theoretical framework of the study.There are 100 examples of zuo,you and left,right in Chinese and English.In this study,we mainly adopt the following methods: introspective and empirical research method,contrastive analytical method.In this paper,the following three questions are studied.(1)How is the meaning transferred in lexical metaphor of zuo/you(left/right)in both Chinese and English?(2)How is the zuo/you(left/right)meaning realized in grammatical metaphor eapecially in perceptive of class shift?(3)What are the differences and similarities of transference of the meaning of Chinese zuo/you and their English counterparts?As for conceptual metaphor,due to the common physiological and cognitive factors,there are many similarities in the conceptual meaning between zuo/you in Chinese and its English counterpart,which can be used to express location,location and direction.Zuo/you and left/right orientation words in Chinese and English have consistency in social status,praise and derogation expressions and political nature.They all migrate the sense domain of orientation to the social domain and the emotional domain.In terms of grammatical metaphor,both left/right and zuo/you in Chinese and English orientational words expand their meanings by transforming their original partofspeech nouns into adjectives or adverbs.Because of the difference of history and culture,Chinese localizers zuo and you can express state,quantity,superiority and inferiority,time and age.However,the English orientational words left and right doesn’t havesuch usages.The zuo/you of Chinese localizers also expand their meanings by transforming nouns into verbs.