隐喻的文化基础考辨

A Probe into the Cultural Basis of Metaphor

如何对主要隐喻进行文化解读一直受到学界的广泛关注和讨论。其焦点主要集中在文化模式到底是不是基于概念隐喻这一问题上。通过深入分析一组含有专有名称的汉语隐喻表达,本文试图对隐喻文化观作一重新审视。我们发现,国人现今爱用异域实体描述本土实体,反映的其实是汉文化中的一种外生规范性。研究表明,该模式具有非经验性,概念隐喻难以成为该模式的基础;人们选用这些表达式只是为了适应现代性的文化模式。

How primary metaphor is to cultural understanding has been a matter of considerable attention and debate. The focus is on whether cultural models are, at bottom, based on conceptual metaphors. This paper makes a tentative probe into the cultural basis of metaphor by examining a new set of Chinese metaphorical expressions involving proper names. It is found that the fact that Chinese people tend to describe local entities in terms of non-local ones reflects a kind of exonormativity of the Chinese culture. By showing that the model is non-empirical, the paper here argues that no conceptual metaphor can be plausibly said to ground this model, and that the expressions are chosen simply because of their fit with the modernity model.