Abstract:

Metaphor, apart from being a figure of speech, is an approach to the cognitive world.It can allow us to construct an abstract world and elaborate concepts according to our concrete experiences. Yet different cultures may apply different metaphors to the same concept. This study makes a comparison in the cognition in Chinese and English metaphors from the concept of “Women” in the two cultures. The comparison is carried out in three registers: in novels, in poems, and in TV series. It shows that there are both similarities and differences between Chinese and English metaphors for the same  concept. That is to say, similarities and differences co-occur in the cognition of Chinese and English speakers. The purpose is to throw some light on the ways of improving English learner’s linguistic competence.

Key words: metaphor; women; cognition

摘要：

隐喻不仅仅是一种修辞手法，更是通往认知世界的重要道路。隐喻可以帮助我们构建一个抽象的世界，并能通过我们的具体经历表达不同的概念尽管在不同文化背景下，同一个概念被用不同的隐喻来表现。本文从小说、诗歌、电视剧等角度对比“女性”这一概念在英汉两种文化中的隐喻，展现了英汉两种语言对相同概念隐喻的既有相似性也有不同点，同时说明，两种语言的使用者在认识上存在异同。本文旨在帮助英语学习者提高语能力。

关键词：隐喻；女性；认知

1. Introduction
We have been familiar with metaphor for almost 2000 years. At the very beginning, we take metaphor as a figure of speech. In the period of Aristotle, metaphor was generally discussed in his two works Poetics and Rhetoric, in which metaphor was viewed as a figure of speech and a tool of language expression that people used to replace one word with another one. By then, Aristotle established the principle clues to the study of metaphors in the Western rhetorical field. Since 1930s, people have begun to study metaphor from the perspective of semantics. In this period, I.A.Richards(1936) put forward the Interaction Theory which was further developed by Max Black. According to the theory of metaphorical interaction, metaphor was a process of generalizing new meanings of words as the result of the interaction of two main words. After the 1970s, scholars of different fields had several systematic studies on metaphor from different perspectives that were characterized as cross-subject and multi-field.