Abstract

Emotion is a more complex and stable experience on the physical attitude, whose specific forms are happiness, sadness, anger, etc. However, metaphor acts as a bridge between the concrete and abstract things, offering the possibility for understanding emotions. Emotional metaphor is one kind of metaphor, and happiness is one of the most important human emotions. Therefore, people use metaphors of the abstract emotion of happiness on the basis of perception and cognition, making the abstract emotion vividly expressed.
In this study, a variety of emotion metaphors in both English and Chinese are   investigated. Meanwhile, it reclassifies the happiness metaphor and discusses the characteristics and the types of happiness metaphor. After a comprehensive analysis and comparison, following conclusions can be drawn: the concept of emotion metaphors in English and Chinese shows the similarities and differences to a certain degree. Take one for example: English often uses natural phenomena to express emotions, such as happiness is “pleasant weather”, while Chinese conceptualizes happiness as “a happy God”. Several reasons caused such difference, such as different cultural contexts and physical environment. And different culture’s characteristics play an important role in metaphor studies.

Keywords: happiness  emotion metaphor  comparison  culture

摘要

情感，复杂而抽象，是态度在生理上一种较复杂而又稳定的生理评价和体验，具体表现为喜悦、悲伤、愤怒等等。而隐喻在具体事物和抽象事物之间起到了桥梁的作用,为更好地理解情感提供了可能性。情感隐喻是隐喻的一大类，喜悦是人类重要的情感之一，人们在感知和认知的基础上将抽象的喜悦情感隐喻化，使抽象的情感能生动形象地表达出来。
研究整理了英汉语中两种情感的隐喻,对“喜悦”的情感进行重新分类，探讨“喜悦”情感隐喻各类别间的关系和实质。经过比较得出结论：英汉情感隐喻在一定程度上表现出它们的相似性和不同点。比如英语中通常会运用自然现象来表示情感,如喜悦是“宜人的天气”，而汉语则把喜悦概念化为“快活似神仙”。 这种差异归因于英汉民族不同的文化背景和地理环境，文化特征在隐喻研究中的作用不可小觑。

关键词: 喜悦；情感隐喻；对比；文化