英语论文网

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Research Background
Human emotion is regarded as the most common and important life experiencein the world, but it is also the major areas of Cognitive Linguistics as well as theeternal theme in literature. Human emotion includes a variety of contents such assadness, pain, anger, fear, love and so on. These contents are mostly abstract, hazy,and the expression of these emotions are sometimes indescribable, so people often usemetaphor. Love is also one of the oldest and most mysterious emotions, Shoulderingwith abundant ideological and cultural connotations. Love, as one of the importanthuman emotional needs, in the form of never failure in associating with life in humansociety. But 'love' is an abstract concept, people can seldom give it an accurate,scientific and comprehensive definition. As this abstract concept is not stem fromhuman experience, it needs to be understood via metaphor methods. Love does nothave an eternal unity mode, it is a kind of hidden abstract emotion in the heart, it isalso a kind of mental state with an invisible form.In order to properly express the love of human nature, people also coincide to usemetaphor. As the description is too blunt, it will destroy the connotation and hazy oflove. Thus it is not able to express the feeling of heart. As metaphor conforms topeople’s concrete mode of thinking and cognitive nature, it happens to provide a wayto vent the love emotion. With the aid of metaphor, the abstract concept of love can beknown as the specific experience which varies from concrete to abstract. To the bestexplanation and interpretation, love is known as the highly symbolic meaning ofculture which passes on from generation to generation. Meanwhile, because ofmetaphor, human languages become more beautiful and amorous.
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1.2 Research Purposes and Questions
This thesis interprets love metaphors based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory.The study of LOVE Metaphor mainly comes from the analysis of the corpus onEnglish and Chinese love songs. This thesis attempts to analysis a large amount ofEnglish and Chinese songs’ lyrics from the cross-language level and it is also basedon Conceptual Metaphor Theory to study the cross-domain mapping in English andChinese songs.This thesis divides English and Chinese LOVE Metaphors into two majorcategories: concrete source domain and abstract source domain. Meanwhile itexplores Cross-domain mapping metaphor of love between English and Chinese tofurther demonstrate that the source domain mapping of metaphor is not only concretebut also can be abstract. In LOVE Metaphor, metaphorical mapping approach is notjust about concrete things to map abstract things, abstract things can be also mappedto abstract things.Furthermore, this thesis also detailed describes the differences on LOVEMetaphor between Chinese and English love songs and explains the reasons. To studythe different cultural connotations between English countries and Chinese from theperspective of cross-cultural research.So the Research questions in this thesis are as follows:(1)What similar cross-domain mappings exist in LOVE Metaphor in English andChinese songs?(2)What differences exist in LOVE Metaphor in English and Chinese songs ?(3)What cultural connotations can be reflected from LOVE Metaphor betweenEnglish and Chinese ?
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Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Previous Studies on Metaphor<