Representation of Sources of the Conceptual Metaphor of 'Love' in Chinese and Russian Fiction Texts of the Postmodern Era (a comparative aspect)

Abstract

The proposed article examines in a comparative aspect on the material of postmodern Chinese and Russian literary texts the representation of the conceptual metaphor of feelings, namely love. The subject of the study is the sources of the conceptual metaphor of love, representing the scope of the goal of the metaphor in the analyzed texts. The aim of the work is to clarify the similarities and differences in the representation of the sources of the studied conceptual metaphor in Chinese and Russian texts. During the study, the following methods were used: the method of semantic analysis, the comparative method, the method of conceptual analysis. Comparative analysis showed the presence of similarities in the representation of the studied metaphor in the areas of the source "Fire", "Disease", "Light", "Reservoir", "Material value". A distinctive feature of the Chinese texts is the representation of the metaphor in the "Plant" area, and the Russian texts – in the "Living Being" area. The practical value of this work is seen in the fact that these materials can be used in classes on the interpretation of artistic texts of the Chinese language in universities. The works of such a plan create a good prospect for the further development of one of the new areas of linguoculturology, namely comparative linguoculturology, within which there is a comparison of heterogeneous unrelated languages. The scientific novelty of this work lies in the fact that for the first time it reveals similarities and differences in the representation of the conceptual metaphor of love using the material of postmodernist fiction in Chinese and Russian. In the course of the work, it was found that in languages of different structures, Chinese and Russian, the presence of more similarities in the representation of the sources of the conceptual metaphor "love" indicates the universality of the formation of this metaphor in the minds of native speakers, which indicates the prospect of developing universalogy in the context of comparative studies of unrelated languages.