A Comparative Study of Emotion Metaphors between English and Chinese

Abstract

Different from traditional linguistics which views metaphor as a means of rhetoric, cognitive linguistics holds that metaphor, instead of being a deviant phenomenon of normal language, is a way of thought and a powerful instrument of cognition. Because of the reason that the traditional linguistics failed to explain the essence of metaphor, the modern linguists began to do research on it from the perspective of language and philosophy. Metaphor has become an essential part in people’s cognitive mechanism instead of being perceived as language phenomenon ever since the publication of masterpiece Metaphor We Live By contributed by Lakeoff and Johnson. In this thesis, cognitive linguistics approach is used to make a comparative analysis between the Chinese and English emotion conceptual metaphors. Conceptual metaphor, as an important concept in cognitive linguistics, refers to something internal, opening deep in human thought, such as ARGUMENT IS WAR and TIME IS MONEY. Emotions, as an important aspect of human experience, have been among the focuses of cognitive linguistics. Emotions are conceptualized and expressed in metaphorical terms. This thesis takes up emotion conceptual metaphors as its topic to study, trying to conduct a cross-linguistic research into the conceptualization of emotion concepts. Based on the analysis of linguistic data from English and Chinese, it tends to explore the similarities and differences between Chinese and English in terms of conceptual metaphors of the two most basic emotions including happiness and sadness.