摘 要

当代西方认知语言学认为，从性质上说，隐喻不属于纯语言的范畴，而属于认知的范畴。隐喻是我们理解抽象概念、进行抽象思维的主要途径，在我们的叙述与思维过程中起着中心作用。西方对隐喻的研究由来已久，1980年，George Lakoff与Mark Johnson合作推出《我们赖以生存的隐喻》，提出没有概念隐喻就无法建立我们的概念体系，就无法认识世界。空间概念“上/下”是人类身体经验所产生的最基本的方位范畴之一，始源域“上”“下”的意象在数量，社会地位，状态以及时间的目标域中的映射作用使得人们得以这些理解复杂抽象的概念，从而使抽象概念也具有了“上”“下”的特征。 本文从认知角度分别分析了英汉两种语言中空间概念“上/下”的隐喻拓展，通过具体的表达实例来分析空间隐喻“上/下”在两种语言中的实现机制，得出的结论是“上/下”隐喻在两种语言中的相同点和不同点是多种因素共同作用的结果。
  
关键词：隐喻；认知；映射；“上/下”
 
Abstract

The study of metaphor enjoys a long history, especially the scholars in western countries who have studied metaphors for a long time. Nowadays, metaphor has aroused interest of many scholars in different fields such as rhetoric function, Semantics, Pragmatics, etc.. The study of metaphor steps into a new era with the publication of George Lakoff & Mark Johnson’s work Metaphors We Live By, and it also means the metaphor study has been brought into the cognitive science. In the cognitive perspective, metaphor is looked as an object we live by to understand abstract things and structure new concepts through those existed. The cognitive approach to metaphor looks metaphor as a way of human cognition. Moreover, human beings exist in an objective world, where gravitation is an indispensable part of our life, in that we are born with receptors and a central nervous system. Taken all aspects together, human beings get used to constructing ourselves and looking at the world by using many spatial expressions like “up-down”, “in-out”, and so on. Gradually our language reflects and organizes our knowledge in spatial concepts, as time goes by, human beings take it for granted. The “up/down” metaphor enjoys a priority in human’s cognition, and its mapping onto the target domains of quantity, social status, states and time enables people to understand abstract concept. This paper provides some common possibilities of its metaphorical extensions in Chinese and English, and some possible causes of similarities and difference are also provided. 

Keywords: metaphor; cognitive; mapping; “up/down”

Chapter 1 Introduction
Metaphor has been a universal phenomenon in human’s daily life, and people almost use metaphor in every moment. Just as Richards says, “Metaphor may appear in every three sentences of our daily conversation.” Metaphor plays such an important role in our life that we often use it unconsciously or that we take it for granted in our language.
The study of metaphor has begun since Aristotle, whose Poetics define it as followed: “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 species, or on grounds of analogy”.Indeed, derived from the Greek meta + pherein, the term metaphor means “transfer”. In the west there have been different approaches to metaphor studies, and many influential theories about metaphor come into being and impose much influence on present studies.