A Contrastive Study on Human Body Words Between English and Chinese
1. Introduction
As mankind life is based on material, human being gained experience from their practice. Our body experience in and with the world sets out the contours of what is meaningful to us and determinates the ways of our understanding. In short, experience assigns a central role to bodily experience in meaning, understanding, and reasoning and metaphor is based on human body experience.
1.1 The Definition of Human Body Words
Human body words usually refer to words that indicate some parts of a human body. Human body plays an important part not only in our life but also in the process of cognition. According to Colins Cobuild English Language Dictionary, human body is defined as “all their physical parts, including their head, limbs, flesh, and organs.” In anthropology, human body can be categorized into four parts and they are respectively head, neck, truck, and limb. Both in Chinese and English, human body words contain a great number of metaphorical phenomena.
1.2 The Theoretical Framework of This Thesis
The research of cognitive linguistics has revealed that metaphor was a common language phenomenon no matter in English or Chinese. Both English and Chinese are languages with many metaphorical words and expressions. Metaphor is contained not only in thinking but also in behavior. Lakoff (1980) thought that the basic function of metaphor was to provide the possibility so that people can understand an experience through another experience. (Lakoff, 1980 21)cross-domain metaphor is the cognitive center of human being’s activities such as generation, transferring and treatment for the meanings. Human beings’ cognitive process can be explained as follows that human beings often use their familiar concept to understand another concept in their fields. This is a process of mapping which uses a concept to map another concept so that a new field is built.
Lakoff (1987) gave a definition of experientialism or experimental realism, which is different from
As mankind life is based on material, human being gained experience from their practice. Our body experience in and with the world sets out the contours of what is meaningful to us and determinates the ways of our understanding. In short, experience assigns a central role to bodily experience in meaning, understanding, and reasoning and metaphor is based on human body experience.
1.1 The Definition of Human Body Words
Human body words usually refer to words that indicate some parts of a human body. Human body plays an important part not only in our life but also in the process of cognition. According to Colins Cobuild English Language Dictionary, human body is defined as “all their physical parts, including their head, limbs, flesh, and organs.” In anthropology, human body can be categorized into four parts and they are respectively head, neck, truck, and limb. Both in Chinese and English, human body words contain a great number of metaphorical phenomena.
1.2 The Theoretical Framework of This Thesis
The research of cognitive linguistics has revealed that metaphor was a common language phenomenon no matter in English or Chinese. Both English and Chinese are languages with many metaphorical words and expressions. Metaphor is contained not only in thinking but also in behavior. Lakoff (1980) thought that the basic function of metaphor was to provide the possibility so that people can understand an experience through another experience. (Lakoff, 1980 21)cross-domain metaphor is the cognitive center of human being’s activities such as generation, transferring and treatment for the meanings. Human beings’ cognitive process can be explained as follows that human beings often use their familiar concept to understand another concept in their fields. This is a process of mapping which uses a concept to map another concept so that a new field is built.
Lakoff (1987) gave a definition of experientialism or experimental realism, which is different from
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