Abstract
The “physical heart” of people around the world is very similar, and this would result in the universality of metaphorical thinking, but the conceptualization of a “mental heart” can differ cross-culturally. This study contributes to the issue of universality vs. intercultural variability of conceptualizations regarding abstract concepts within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Cold heart-related metaphors were analyzed via qualitative and quantitative analysis of data collected from two authoritative corpora—Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Results reveal that the universal bodily experience accounts for the shared source domain for a cold heart metaphor. However, the shared metaphor heart is temperature displays variations in detail. To construe cold heart-related metaphors in Chinese, we should mainly take a “patient view” to investigate the response from others which indicates the passiveness and less pronounced ego-centrality, while an “agent view” is generally adopted to study “cold heart” in English that focuses on the apathy to others which means that a human’s own initiated mind or attitude is the locus. These findings suggest that cultural variance in individualism vs. collectivism motivates different conceptualizations of cold heart.
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