The Love Metaphor of Plant in Chinese and Its Cognitive Grounding

Based on the corpus,the metaphorical structure of Love Are Plants in Chinese includes six stages:(1)sowing/rooting/ger-minating,(2)growing,(3)flowering,(4)flower fading,(5)fruiting,and(6)withering.The stages of plant growth and the developmentstages of love basically show a one-to-one correspondence,and its cognitive grounding is the psychological similarity between thesource domain PLANTS and the target domain LOVE,which is not an objective existence,but a subjective judgment of the addresser.

Study on Cognitive Metaphors in King Gesar and Its English Version

This thesis analyzes the book King Gesar and its English version through cognitive metaphors or concept metaphors.It studies on the three types of metaphors among them and the target domain coming from emotions,nature and animals.Its purpose is to provide a cognitive understanding for translation practices.

A Study on Acquisition of English Preposition in by Chinese Non-English Major Students Under the Principled-Polysemy Model

English preposition is one of difficult points in second language acquisition.This paper analyzes the differences of the senses of preposition in between Chinese non-English major students and native English students based on corpus from a perspective of cognitive linguistics.The study has found that Chinese non-English major students overuse the prototypical semantic entries,the low-level metaphorical entries and certain fixed phrases of in,without the diversity in using other metaphorical meanings.Through systematic analysis of the selected data,we think that the non-correspondence of prepositional semantic categories between English and Chinese caused by different conceptualizations is the main cause of this deviation.

A Cognitive Account of Metaphor Translation in Two Chinese Versions of The Wind in the Willows

Cognitive Metaphor Theory(CMT), originally formulated by Lakoff and Johnson in 1980, rejects the traditional view of metaphor being a rhetorical phenomenon, and redefines it as a cognitive instrument by which humans perceive, categorize, and conceptualize the world.The cognitive method of metaphor studies offers an innovative research perspective on metaphor translation, which is more a process of reproducing in the target language the mapping relations of the original metaphor than a simple transplantation of the concept on the linguistic level.Metaphor is one of the most common figures of speech in children's literature, but its translation is not as effortless as it might be, for translators have to take into account not only factors such as linguistic, cultural, and social differences, but also children's limited linguistic level and cognitive abilities, which altogether pose a formidable challenge to translators.This paper attempts to construct a cognitive metaphor translation model by exploring the cognitive process that translators go through when dealing with metaphor from the perspective of CMT.The cognitive metaphor translation process is specified as including three steps: metaphor comprehension, metaphor adjustment, and metaphor reconstruction.By analyzing metaphor examples extracted from two Chinese versions of The Wind in the Willows, a masterpiece of Kenneth Grahame in children's literature of Britain, this article summarizes metaphor translation techniques in children's literature.

Metaphorical Explanations for Misuse of the English Preposition IN by CELs:A Corpus Analysis

There exist differences between the usages of prepositions in English and Chinese, not only for the different cultural backgrounds, but for the different cognitive models. The use of English prepositions is a great challenge for Chinese English learners (CELs). This essay discusses the misuse of the English spatial preposition IN by CELs, using the data collected from Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) against other corpora such as BNC, FLOB, FROWN as reference corpora. The statistical data, such as Frequency and Type/Token Ratio (TTR) of IN, shows that the overuse of IN is typical for Chinese English learners, and it also offers a reasonable explanation for the misuse of IN using the image schema in cognitive metaphor theory (CMT). The polysemy of the spatial preposition IN can be divided into different image schemas. Chinese English learners can avoid preposition misuse with the help of image-schemas.

Semiotics Turning Cross-Cultural

Semiotics,mostly as a theory of meaning,has a long history both in China and in the West.Although there had been little interaction between these two independent traditions before the 20th century,we can fi nd some interesting similarities and differences in their semiotic thoughts that continue to influence how we conceptualize things today.Contemporary China,for example,is widely seen as being characterized by a Marxist epistemology which was imported from the West,but a close examination shows that this dominant theory of knowledge is as much a product of its own native tradition of ontological realism propounded by Ouyang Jian 17 centuries ago.With the advent of globalization of semiotics in the 20th century,Chinese and Western scholars are now able to take direct advantage of each other’s theoretical resources which often result in new insights critical to the advancement of human knowledge.Two examples of such East-West interaction are Peirce’s trichotomy of signs being appropriated for the classification of Chinese characters and Qian Zhongshu’s"sides-andhandles theory of metaphor"serving as a critique of the bewildered and bewildering cognitive science championed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.It is in this sense that semiotics is becoming increasingly global or cross-cultural on top of its interdisciplinary trademark.