Conceptual metaphors of anger in Chinese and English: a contrastive analysis

Abstract

Cognitive linguistics postulates that the metaphor serves an important role in human thought. Our conceptual system exists in a strong correlation to the metaphor which mirrors the cultural reality of our lives. Metaphors are grounded on culture and conceptual metaphors are mirrored in a language, which is a significant component of culture. Adopting the theory of the metaphor as the mapping between source and target domains, this paper aims at analyzing how the conceptual metaphors of anger are reflected in the English and Chinese languages