A Comparative Study Of Lexicalized Metaphors Expressing The Concept Of "fear" In English And Chinese

Emotion is one of the important parts of human beings,while it is too abstract and elusive to be described clearly.“Fear”,one of the basic emotions,has been a research hot point for a long time.Metaphor is not only a figure of speech but also a cognitive mechanism in thought.Metaphor can reveal the cognitive process based on bodily experience,that is,to understand an unfamiliar and abstract conceptual domain,which is regarded as the target domain,in terms of the familiar and concrete conceptual domain,which is regarded as the source domain.Lexicalized metaphor is a combination of lexicalized item and conceptual metaphor,but it is more concrete than conceptual metaphor.The analysis of lexicalized metaphors expressing the concept of “fear” could reveal how people conceptualize “fear”.Human cognitive activities are rooted in bodily experience and reflected in languages.If there are similarities of lexicalized metaphors between different languages,then it is reasonable to believe that the conceptualization of “fear” is based on the universal bodily experience.But because of the different cultural backgrounds,the lexicalized metaphors in one language do not always have their counterparts in other languages.The comparative analysis of lexicalized metaphors between different languages could figure out how the universal bodily experiences and different cultural effects play the roles in the conceptualization of “fear”.This study seeks to take conceptual metaphor theory as the theoretical framework and employ the bottom-up analysis method of corpus linguistics.And then the comparative analysis of lexicalized metaphors expressing the concept of “fear” in English and Chinese would be carried out.The results show that both similarities and differences appear in lexicalized metaphors expressing the concept of “fear” between English and Chinese.The reasons for similarities are based on the common bodily experience shared in English and Chinese,including common physiological experience with the emotion of “fear” and similar life experience with the world.The causes of differences between them are mainly some cultural effects,including the differences in the living environments and the traditional beliefs.