A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Conceptual Metaphor From The Perspective Of Prototype Category

The study of metaphor has a long history.Traditional rhetoric holds that metaphor is a rhetorical means used to modify decorate language.Modern cognitive metaphorical theory holds that metaphor is not only a linguistic phenomenon,but also a cognitive phenomenon in essence.It permeates our daily life and is an indispensable tool and means for people to understand things and build abstract concepts.This change has greatly broadened the perspective of metaphor research.Metaphor research is one of the important contents of modern cognitive linguistics research.In recent years,many Chinese and foreign scholars engaged in cognitive linguistics have made a lot of research on metaphors and obtained fruitful research results from the perspective of human thinking and cultural differences.Among them,conceptual metaphor theory is the most representative basic theoretical achievement of many research results,and has been widely used in many other disciplines,including economic,political,diplomatic and scientific discourse areas.Because of the root of different cultures,English-Chinese metaphors must have obvious differences.Therefore,the study of the contrast between English and Chinese metaphor has aroused the wide attention of scholars at home and abroad.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory put forward by Lakoff and Johnson(1980),this thesis makes a contrastive analysis of the metaphorical concept of life in English and“??”“??”concept in Chinese and explains the rationale of culture.Conceptual metaphor is deep-seated and has their cultural attributes.Metaphorical thinking is manifested by specific language expressions.This study attempts to combine conceptual metaphor theory with another important theoretical achievement of cognitive linguistics,i.e.the prototype category theory,and tries to explain and classify conceptual metaphor from the perspective of prototype category.This thesis mainly discusses the question:Can the metaphorical expressions under a particular abstract concept constitute a prototype category based on a particular conceptual metaphor?Combining the two theoretical achievements of cognitive linguistics is an attempt and innovation in theory,which has important theoretical value and practical significance.Based on the above theory,this study makes a contrastive analysis of the conceptual metaphors of life in English and“??”“??”concept in Chinese.Conceptual metaphor is the refinement and summary of people's daily expression of language.The daily metaphorical expressions are the concrete embodiment of conceptual metaphor.A series of metaphors are produced around specific conceptual metaphors.From the perspective of prototype theory,this study examines whether such metaphors can constitute a prototype category through research and induction.At the same time,it reveals the cultural differences contained in metaphor and the important role of metaphor in understanding different cultures and languages.This thesis uses the method based on the corpus instead of the traditional reflection method to study the life metaphor.The two corpus used in this paper are COCA and CCL,both of which are recognized as large corpus.Therefore,the method is empirical and the data obtained are comprehensive and reliable.The study of this thesis is also of great theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,it is an attempt and innovation to study conceptual metaphor from the perspective of prototype category and combine the theory of prototype category with the theory of conceptual metaphor.In practice,metaphor research is an important window and component of cross-cultural research.It is necessary to study it from different angles to promote the construction and development of cross-cultural communication disciplines.At the same time,it also has important practical significance for second language teaching.