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A Study of Conceptual Metaphors in Heart and Xin Expressions

Author: YaoShiSi
Tutor: WangJiaLi
School: Hunan Normal University
Course: English Language and Literature
Keywords: conceptual metaphor heart xin
CLC: H315
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 219
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Abstract


The study of metaphor, which has been the concern for linguists, can date back to 15th century. Traditionally metaphor was regarded as a kind of rhetorical device, which was often employed to achieve the effect of comparison in literary work. There exist three major theories of metaphor in the history of metaphor study, namely, Comparison Theory, Substitution Theory and the Interaction Theory. All these theories hold that metaphor is a kind of ornament of language. In the early 1980s, Lakoff and Johnson published their work Metaphors we Live by, which was the revolution of the metaphorical research. They claim metaphor is pervasive in every aspect of our life, not only in language but also in thinking and action. To a great extent our metaphors rely on the conceptualization of our experience, especially on physical experience. Heart is one of the most important organs in human body. Therefore, it is meaningful to select heart as the subject of study.In the first chapter of this thesis, the history of metaphor study is briefly reviewed, and some major theories on metaphor are introduced. In the second chapter we provide a specific idea of the theoretical background—conceptual metaphor theory in this thesis, in which the cross-domain mapping, target-domain, source-domain, the types of conceptual metaphors, and the characteristics of conceptual metaphors are introduced. It is worth noting that cross-domain mapping plays a key role in creation of metaphors, because it is the working mechanism of conceptual metaphors, which can be treated as a mapping from a source domain to a target domain. Every mapping is a fixed series of ontological correspondences between entities in a source-domain and that in target-domain, and it is partial. The third chapter is the analysis of the heart metaphor in English and Chinese from the aspect of conceptual metaphor. We generalize some metaphorical models from expressions on heart, namely HEART IS A CONTAINER, HEART IS AN OBJECT and so on, and list some examples about heart metaphors in both languages. Furthermore, similarities and differences of heart metaphors are summarized and their reasons are also analyzed from a cognitive point of view. Metaphor is fundamentally conceptual in nature, and it depends on our conceptualization of experience to a great extent. However, human-beings share almost the same experience especially physical experience, so people’s metaphors around the world are similar, which is the universality of conceptual metaphors. On the other hand, heart metaphors are distinct from xin metaphors, because different cultures nurture different values, which affect the patterns of conceptualization. That is the particularity of conceptual metaphors. In addition, heart can be regarded as target-domain as well as source-domain. In the former metaphorical models, heart was treated as target-domain, but heart can also be used as source-domain, that is:IMPORTANCE AS HEART and CENTER AS HEART. At last the relationship between the conceptual metaphor and EFL vocabulary teaching is analyzed, and then we apply the conceptual theory to the EFL vocabulary teaching and try to provide some suggestions.

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