7。 Conclusion 30

7。1 Major Findings of the study 30

7。2 Contributions and Limitations 32

8。 Reference 32

9。 Acknowledgements 35

1。 Introduction

Metaphors has long been regarded as a rhetorical tool that matters only in literary works。 In 1980s, Lakoff and Johnson came up with the theory of conceptual metaphor and proposed that metaphor is in our daily life and greatly influences our mode of thinking unconsciously or sometimes consciously。 The studies FIRE and WATER as examples to look into the mechanism of conceptual metaphor and the reason that cause the peculiarities in Chinese and English。 Water is the core in Chinese traditional culture while fire plays the same role in western culture。 Thus, they are typical examples of metaphor to tell the differences between two civilizations。 The data in this study is taken from British National Corpus (BYU-BNC), Corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU (CCLC), Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford Learners’ Dictionary and Modern Chinese Dictionary。 

2。 Theoretical Foundations

2。1 The Development of Metaphor

The word “metaphor” is originated from the Greek word “metaphorá” which means “transfer”。 Traditional studies of metaphor in either philosophy or linguistics incline to view metaphor as simply a linguistic entity。 Based upon different understandings and philosophy systems, the study of metaphor develops from rhetoric to cognition。

2。1。1 Aristotelian Theory

The study of metaphor goes through a long history dating back to the ancient Greek scholars, like Aristotle。 “Traditionally, we feel, it languished as one among the many figures of rhetoric。” (Hartman, 1982, p。327) At that period of time, metaphor was viewed as a way to modify words or phrases and was relegated to the field of rhetoric and poetic。 Metaphor is mainly weighed as an entity of words or a linguistic phenomenon, only used for some artistic and rhetorical purpose。 Actually, Aristotle illustrates in his work Poetics (1982) that “metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or form species to species, or on the ground of analogy。” He gave the basic metaphor form “A is B”。 This notion of metaphor then develop into the comparison theory of metaphor。 However, this viewpoint delimits metaphor as only working in linguistic area, in isolation from the cognitive area。 

2。1。2 Interaction Theory

Aristotelian theory about metaphor remains its power in later study of metaphor and greatly influences the theories like Quintilian’s substitutions theory。 Then in the 1930s, Richards developed the Interaction Theory which fills the void of the traditional theory which means they look into not only transference between two objectives, but how it happens。 He proposed that ideology is with metaphorical features naturally, and language is thus metaphorical。 In his book Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), he stated the universality of metaphor in our language and classifies a metaphor into three parts called “tenor”, “vehicle” and “ground”。 This theory is further developed by Max Black。 He said “Metaphor is not a property of names, but extra metaphorical meaning which is created in the collision of two concepts in a metaphor。 Metaphor is defined as interaction between the primary and the secondary conceptual systems。 Transference between these systems is two-directional。” (Black, 1962, p。53) However, the Interaction Theory failed to explain the cognitive nature of metaphor well。 Actually, it still limits on the area of language。