A Cognitive Contrastive Analysis of Chinese and English Metaphors

Abstract

Cognitive linguists hold that metaphor is a general thinking mode as well as a means of cognition. Because of the same body mechanism and many similar life histories, there are many similar and even same conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese. However, through a comparative study of some conceptual metaphors in English and Chinese, from a perspective of cognitive linguistics, differences are also found. Some reasons that lead to such differences are listed in this article.