英语专业论文爱情中的隐喻.doc

晋中学院本科生毕业论文（设计）

晋 中 学 院
本科毕业论文（设计）

题 目 英汉诗歌爱情隐喻
的对比浅析
院 系 外国语学院
专 业 英语
姓 名 张翌芳
学 号 1003111236
学习年限 2010年 9月至2014年6月
指导教师 姜丹丹 讲师
申请学位 文学学士学位

2014年 6月6 日

Acknowledgements

First of all, I owe my greatest thanks to my supervisor Jiang Dandan for her careful guidance and valuable advice during my writing of this thesis. Without her patient encouragement, it is impossible for me to finish my thesis.
Secondly, I want to express my thanks to all the teachers of the school of foreign languages, for their excellent lectures and sincere guidance in the past three years. The learning experience in the school of foreign languages is unforgettable for me.
Finally, my special thanks are given to my family and friends for their understanding, constant support and encouragement.

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Comparative Study of Love Metaphors in English and Chinese Poems
Author’s Name: Zhang Yifang Tutor: Jiang Dandan

Abstract: Metaphor is traditionally treated as a figure of speech, which is in nature an ornament of language at the linguistic level. Traditional studies on metaphor were mainly confined to literature and rhetoric. With the development of cognitive linguistics in 1980s, the significance of metaphor has been realized from a new perspective, which made metaphor a hot topic in various disciplines. In recent years, the focus of metaphor research has turned to emotion metaphor, and the study, employing daily utterances as corpus, mainly concerns with the emotions like happiness, angry, sadness and fear etc. But there is relatively less study on love metaphor in poems. Poetry is a special way to convey emotions, and there are plenty of rich metaphors in it. Therefore the study of poetic metaphor gradually becomes a new field for the linguists.
Different nations display different cultural experience as well as the same bodily experience, which determines that there may be similarities and differences of metaphors in different cultures. Therefore, this paper examines a large number of verses in English and Chinese poetry, and it found out love metaphors in English and Chinese poetry have great similarities and uniqueness. The conclusion is that it is the factors of bodily and life experience and cultural experience that led to similarities and dissimilarities in Chinese and English

Keywords: love metaphors; poems; comparative study

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英汉诗歌爱情隐喻的对比浅析

学生姓名：张翌芳 指导老师：姜丹丹

摘 要:传统的隐喻观认为隐喻是一种修辞方式，其在本质上只是一种装饰性的语言现象，隐喻研究也只局限于文学和修辞方面。二十世纪八十年代，随着认知语言学的兴起，人们对隐喻的重要作用有了全新的认识，隐喻也成为众多学科关注的热门话题。
隐喻研究的焦点逐渐转向情感隐喻，多以日常话语为语料，对喜、怒、哀、恐等情感隐喻进行研究，但对诗歌中爱情隐喻的研究相对较少。而诗歌作为一种特殊的情感表达方式，其间蕴含了丰富的隐喻，诗歌隐喻逐渐成为隐喻研究的一个新领域。
由于不同民族既具有基本相同的身体经验，又具有不同的文化经验，这就决定了隐喻在不同的语言文化中既可能存在着一定的共性，同时又存在着不同的文化特征。沿着这些思路，本文选择与人类密切相关的 “爱情”这一概念，考察了大量英语和汉语诗歌的诗句,发现英语和汉语诗歌中的爱情概念隐喻有很大的相似性和独特性。最后得出由于个体生活经验不同和文化体验不同因素导致了这两种语言中隐喻的相似性和相异性。

关键词：爱情隐喻；英汉诗歌；对比研究

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Contents

Acknowledgements i
Abstract in English ii
Abstract in Chinese iii

ⅠIntroduction 1
ⅡLiterature Review 2
ⅢConceptual Metaphor in English and Chinese Poems 3
3.1 The definition of conceptual metaphor 3
3.2 The characteristics of conceptual metaphor 4
ⅣThe Analysis of English and Chinese Conceptual Metaphors of "Love" 5
4.1 General conceptual metaphors of "love" 5
4.1.1 Love is a journey 6
4.1.2 Love is plant 7
4.1.3 Love is illness 7
4.1.4 Love is a shining object 8
4.2 Specific conceptual metaphors of "love" in English poems 8
4.2.1 Love is a valuable object 9
4.2.2 Love is sport 10
4.3 Specific conceptual metaphors of "love" in Chinese poems 10
4.3.1 Love is agricultural product 10
4.3.2 Love is a predestined relationship 11
4.3.3 Love is music 11
4.4 Reasons of similarities and differences 12
ⅤConclusion 14
Bibliography 16

ⅠIntroduction
This paper aims to do a further research in the emotion of love from the cognitive aspects, which pays attention to the comparative study of love metaphors in the English and Chinese poems. Specifically, it studies the similarities and differences of love metaphors in Chinese and English love poems, but it also explores the cause of these similarities and differences in cognitive models and cultural perspectives.
Since the 1980s, cognitive linguistics has become a hot topic in Europe. Cognitive linguists has made many functional studies of metaphors about conceptualization of emotion in the UK, including anger, fear, happiness, sadness , love, lust , pride, shame , and surprises. Love is a basic human emotion. Lakoff and Johnson had listed some love metaphors in their book Metaphors we live by. They think that the concept of metaphor is the base of our daily lives. It is also reflected in our literal language. Kövecses summarized the structure of love metaphors through the research in English language in the book of Metaphors of Anger, Pride and Love. In later studies, Kövecses claims that English speaking people usually use 24 conceptual metaphors of love in everyday communication. The central point of these studies is that love which is abstract in nature, in large part, is conceptualized and expressed in the form of metaphorization.
Although many scholars have succeeded in studying the concept of love metaphors in English, there are few comparative studies about the love metaphors from the perspective of cognitive linguistics to explain the universality of love, and also little research on the base of English and Chinese poetry. This article aims to provide some evidence from cognitive theory of metaphor for contemporary study and offers a broader perspective for the study of metaphor.
This paper will explore the love metaphors in the poetry. Cognitive linguists believe that the understanding of metaphor and emotion occurrence is closely related to the context, but this does not affect us to do research on emotional metaphors. Since some metaphorical expressions of love can only be understood in a certain context, the data is not a random collection. China's main source of data is remarkable love poems. English is collected in the same way. The selected data are derived from the famous characters' classics. Examples excited in fact are only a small part of the collection of data in the subsequent studies. In the following section, from the general point of view of concept metaphors, there will be a comparative analysis, because metaphors are common to both two languages.

ⅡLiterature Review
Emotion is very important in human experience and it is the focus of the study in cognitive linguistics, and metaphor is regarded as an important factor in the way we conceive of emotion. In the past two decades, many scholars (Lakoff &Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff & Kövecses 1987; Kövecses 1988, 2000) have studied the function of metaphor in the conceptualization of emotion in English language. Among the emotion concepts, love plays an important part which connotes profound and mysterious meanings.
The contemporary theory of metaphor is closely associated with cognitive linguistics. The cognitive theory of metaphor is first developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In 1980 they jointly published Metaphors We Live By, and the book has been regarded as a landmark of cognitive study of metaphor, since they challenged the traditional metaphor theory in a coherent and systematic way. Cognitive linguistics studies language based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it, and cognitive scholars believe that natural language is a product of the human mind. In cognitive linguistics, metaphor is not simply a rhetorical device, but a way of thinking and acting.
As for the emotion of love, Lakoff and Johnson list a few examples of love metaphors in their book Metaphors we live by. In these metaphors, love is conceptualized as war, patient, madness, physical force, etc. They claim that metaphors partially structure our everyday concepts and this structure is reflected in our literal language. In the book Metaphors of Anger, Pride and Love, Kövecses examines the emotions of anger, pride and love that are expressed in different English metaphors. He gives introduction to the structure of romantic love through the study of English language that native speakers employ to talk about the concept of love, and obtains many conceptual systems of love metaphors, such as love is journey, love is unity of parts, love is fluid in a container, love is fire, etc.( in Dong Yingying, 2007)
Later, Kövecses (2000) illustrates the important findings of the love emotion through the investigation of the structure of romantic love. He points out that native English-speakers employ 24 conceptual metaphors to conceive love in their everyday communication. The conceptual metaphors related to love are mostly derived from ordinary English language.
All these studies find that the emotion of love is, to a great extent, conceptualized and expressed in metaphorical terms. But all these studies on love metaphor are based on daily communication in English language.
With the development of cognitive linguistics, the study of conceptual metaphor began to attract the attention of Chinese linguists, such as Lin Xinwu, Hu Zhuanglin, Shu Dingfang, Zhao Yanfang, Lan Chun, Wang Yin, etc. In 1990s, book reviews of the important works in metaphor study also began to appear in the core magazines, the representatives are: Metaphor: Its Force and Linguistic Structure by Lin Xinwu.
At the same time, with the further study of emotion metaphors, the focus has also been paid to the love metaphors, and some research work has been done to it. Such as: A Comparative Study of English and Chinese Conceptual Metaphor of Love (Meng Jingyi, 2005); A Comparative Study of Love Metaphor in English and Chinese (Pan Hongying, 2006); A Cognitive Approach to Love Metaphors in English and Chinese Love Songs (Sun Yali, 2006); A Cognitive Comparative Study of English and Chinese Love Metaphors (Li Guanghua, 2008), etc. But in these studies on love metaphors, they all use the everyday utterance or love songs as their research corpus. Up to now, only a few master dissertations and some periodical papers are concentrating with the comparative studies of love metaphors in English and Chinese poems. The representatives are: A Comparative Study of Metaphors of Love in English and Chinese Poems (Wang Dandan, 2005); A Comparative Study of Love Metaphors in XU Zhimo and Yeats’ Poetry from Cognitive Perspective (Dong Yingying, 2007); A Comparative Study of Love Metaphors in English and Chinese Poems (Jiang Zhihao, 2008, (3): 78-81), etc.

ⅢConceptual Metaphor in English and Chinese Poems
According to contemporary linguistic views, metaphor is a kind of cognitive phenomena of human being, far from a matter of decoration or convenience. We conceptualize the world with the help of metaphor consciously or unconsciously.
3.1 The definition of conceptual metaphor
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) state that metaphor is in nature to understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another. According to Lakoff and Johnson, conceptual metaphor can be classified into structural metaphors, orientational metaphors and ontological metaphors.
Metaphors are viewed as mappings across the source domain and the target domain, and the source domain is concrete whereas the target is abstract. Metaphorical mapping are not arbitrary, but grounded in the body, everyday experience and knowledge; and mappings bear three features: the invariance principle, target domain overrides and asymmetry of mapping. The system of conceptual metaphor is structured by its ontological and epistemic correspondences. Image schema is another cognitive level, and it plays an important role in structuring and understanding more complicated concepts. Metaphorical mappings are not arbitrary because they are largely constrained by image schema. Image schemas are pervasive in our bodily experience, and they structure our experience pre-conceptually, and are mapped by metaphors onto abstract domains, with their basic logic preserved.
In cognitive point of view, metaphor is omnipresent in language; it is systematic because an ordinary conceptual metaphor can produce many metaphorical expressions and various conceptual metaphors then form a large closely related system; metaphor is essentially cognitive because as an efficient method of conceptualization, it makes the understanding of those new and abstract concepts much easier through mapping some concrete concepts onto them (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980).
The traditional language study regarded metaphor as a rhetorical phenomenon and a form of language changing. Gibbs concluded that, based on the views of many linguists and philosophers, if it is interpreted literally, a metaphor is "grammatically deviant, semantically anomalous, conceptually absurd or simply false" (Gibbs, 1994:222).Metaphor in traditional rhetoric found its position in poems as a rhetoric phenomenon. Barfield claimed that this is a kind of form, a little-known term is compared to a better-known term, and then the latter may explain former in 1973. Aristotle in his book poetics and rhetoric, point out that metaphor refers to the intrinsic relationship between the literal expression and their corresponding expressions.
3.2 The characteristics of conceptual metaphor
From a cognitive perspective, conceptual metaphor has three characteristics : Metaphor is conceptual in nature. Metaphor is ubiquitous, and metaphor is systematic.
Metaphor appears in the process of understanding a thing with the help of another term, it is not only a way of language expression, but also a way of thinking. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggested that metaphors occurs not only in language but also in our thoughts and actions. Human beings’ daily conceptual system through which people's think and behave, in essence, is metaphorical. The meaning of language is that they are an essential part of understanding many new concepts. In short, metaphorical language is not only a phenomenon, but also in the concept of nature.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 3) state that "Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life". They also provide evidence for this point that through theoretical argument and practical investigation, many other scholars have also realized the metaphors. Gibbs (1994)provided the significant evidence through his studies. McNeill (1992) verifies the university of metaphors from a new perspective of gestures. He studied metaphors on the basis of gestures accompanying with people’s talking.
Conceptual metaphor does not exist isolated from each other. In other words, a coherent system of metaphori