浅析英汉“心”词汇的隐喻认知特点

A Study on the Cognitive Feature of the English and Chinese Word of Heart

隐喻不仅仅是一种语言现象,而且也是一种认知现象。隐喻的实质就是把熟悉的认知域概念映射到陌生的认知域中,生成新的概念,借以理解陌生的事物。"心"是人体的最重要的器官之一,它在构造概念和理解事物的过程中有着重要作用。通过对英汉"心"的隐喻词汇的认知特点的对比分析显示,英汉"心"词汇隐喻认知有很多相似之处,它们的映射路径很多也是相同的。但汉语中"心"的映射面要广得多,构成的词汇也多,而英语中"heart"的映射面相对较窄,产生这种差异的原因在于两个民族的经验基础不同,形成了不同的隐喻具象。

Metaphor is not only a kind of language phenomenon, but also a cognitive phenomenon of human being. The essence of metaphor is to create new concept to understand the unfamiliar things by mapping the familiar concepts to unfamiliar ones. The heart is one of the most important parts of body, which plays an important role in constructing the concepts. This paper analyzes the metaphoric concepts constructed by heart in both English and Chinese by comparing the cognitive features of metaphoric expressions involving both English and Chinese, showing that there are many similarities in metaphoric cognition of heart in both English and Chinese and their mapping routes are also have some similarities. However, the word of heart in Chinese maps more broadly and constructs more words than that in English. The reason causes that discrepancies is the different experience of both nations, so different metaphoric concept arises.