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Emotional idiom of human organs in Chinese, English, Japanese Metaphor

Author: LiuChang
Tutor: WangYuanXin
School: Central University for Nationalities
Course: Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: Chinese English and Japanese Emotion Idiom Vehicle Choosing similarities and differences
CLC: H315;H36
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2010
Downloads: 142
Quote: 1
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Abstract

Human beings are familiar with their bodies, so human body is the foundation for human beings to recognize the world and abstract objects. Chinese is an isolating language while English is an inflectional language and Japanese is an agglutinative language. All of them have many idioms expressing emotions that take body as vehicle. Why people often take human organs as vehicle while expressing emotions? What are the similarities and differences in vehicle choosing among Chinese English and Japanese? This thesis will focus on these questions.The emotion idioms in different languages have similarities and differences in vehicle distribution which related to human organs. The similarities are determined by the similarities of human physiological structure and the generality of cognition. The differences are the reflection of differences in cognition, habit of thought, culture, etc.. Besides, comparing the vehicle of emotion idioms which shows positive emotion and negative emotion, we can find that because different culture has different attitude in dealing with positive or negative emotions, there are differences in vehicle choosing. Especially in the idioms which shows negative emotions, Chinese and Japanese often choose internal organs as vehicle while English often choose extremities as vehicle. But whatever the emotions are, it is positive correlation between the number of vehicles and the physiological awake level.There is "one vehicle, different means" phenomenon of the emotion idiom. This phenomenon is closely and inseparably related to the relationship of those emotion tenors. The definition of "one vehicle, different means" has to meet the conditions that two emotions are similar to each other in one or many aspects or highly similar in physiological feeling.Idioms are flexible in using whereas some restrain rules exist. The variation of emotion idioms often occurs on verbs, and the nouns describing human’s organs are the most stable elements. Besides, emotion idioms’ variation forms also show the typological characteristics of the three languages. Finally, predict emotion idioms’ developing trend by analyzing the idioms and their variation forms.

Emotional idiom of human organs in Chinese, English, Japanese Metaphor

Abstract

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