Ning Yu

• Pennsylvania State University

This paper discusses the relationship between metaphor, body and culture. Cogni-tive linguistics maintains that the mind is embodied. While abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical, metaphors that structure them are largely derived from bodily experience. Since human beings all share a basic body structure, and have many common bodily experiences,...

Applying conceptual metaphor theory, this study aims to discuss how metaphors emerge from the interaction between perceptual experience and cultural environment, comparing English and Chinese. The kind of metaphors under study is rooted in the object image schema, particularly in its dimension in solidity with bipolar values as hard and soft . Spec...

Hardback 9780192866325 304 pages £75.00 | $100.00 "Ning Yu's new book offers an insightful analysis of the metaphorical basis for moral reasoning ... The book will appeal to readers from many academic disciplines, and represents cognitive linguistics at its very best!"-Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., author of Metaphor Wars: Conceptual Metaphor in Human L...

This chapter is a corpus-based study of the relationship between language and thought in general and linguistic and conceptual metaphors in particular, focusing on instances of linguistic embodiment. It attempts to show, with evidence from relevant linguistic corpora, that salient features in linguistic patterns, both qualitative and quantitative,...

This entry presents a cognitive linguistic view of figurative language, with a focus on conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), which distinguishes between conceptual and linguistic metaphors. Conceptual metaphors are concepts linked by metaphorical mappings in our conceptual systems whereas linguistic metaphors manifest metaphorical conceptual mappings...

This is a linguistic study of two primary metaphors with the same target concept, “DIFFICULTY IS WEIGHT” and “DIFFICULTY IS SOLIDITY,” in English and Chinese. The study employs both lexical and corpus-based approaches in order to gain insights into their manifestation in the two languages. In an attempt to show how the two primary metaphors manifes...

This presentation covered a methodological approach to healthcare transitions that proposes the Location Event Structure Metaphor as an analytical tool, rather than an object of analysis itself.

This is a linguistic study of two primary metaphors with the same target-domain concept, “IMPORTANCE IS SIZE” and “IMPORTANCE IS WEIGHT,” in English and Chinese. It is suggested that these two primary metaphors are derived from the OBJECT image schema, abstracted from our embodied, sensorimotor experience, especially our visual and tactile percepti...

This chapter argues that life is an opera is a cultural metaphor with a rich cultural schema, representing an important aspect of the conceptualization of life in Chinese culture, and characterising cultural cognition of the Chinese as a cultural group. In this cultural metaphor, the source domain, opera, is a cultural category, referring specifica...

Cognitive semantic studies have shown that our conceptualization of morality is at least partially metaphorical and that our moral cognition is grounded in some fundamental contrastive categories of our embodied experience in the physical environment. It is argued that our moral cognition is built on a moral metaphor system. Within the framework of...

This study aims to contribute to the research on spatial metaphors for morality from the perspective of Chinese. It outlines the linguistic patterns in Chinese that manifest the putative underlying spatial subsystem of moral metaphors, which can be summarized by a central metaphor “MORALITY IS SPATIALITY.” In doing so, it focuses on 17 spatial word...

This study analyzes the linguistic patterns via both qualitative and quantitative data that manifest the underlying conceptual metaphor life is a show in Chinese. It starts with an analysis of the performing arts frame as the source domain of the show metaphor. The frame comprises three major aspects: people, performance, and venue, and each of the...

This article studies the moral metaphor system focusing on a subsystem consisting of five pairs of MORAL and IMMORAL metaphors whose source concepts represent some contrastive categories in our visual experience: WHITE and BLACK, LIGHT and DARK, CLEAR and MURKY, CLEAN and DIRTY, PURE and IMPURE. The study examines whether these moral metaphors are...

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Culture presents the first authoritative and comprehensive survey of research on the relationship between language and culture. It provides readers with a clear and accessible introduction to both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary studies of language and culture, offering insights into their historical d...

This paper studies the metaphorical time orientation in Chinese along its horizontal and vertical axes. It will focus, however, on the controversy over its horizontal axis, readdressing the issue regarding whether the Chinese ego faces toward the future or past in metaphorical orientation of time. It is interesting to note that there exist three di...

This article applies a decompositional approach to analyzing the metaphorical structure of a China Central Television (CCTV) Olympics commercial as a multimodal discourse from the perspective of cognitive semantics. The Beijing 2008 Olympics' motto was “One World, One Dream,” which highlights the notion of the world as a “global village.” The comme...

Research on the “embodiment hypothesis” within cognitive linguistics and beyond is growing steadily aiming to bridge language, culture, and cognition. This volume seeks to address the question regarding what specific roles individual body parts play in the embodied conceptualization of emotions, mental faculties, character traits, cultural values,...

Research on the “embodiment hypothesis” within cognitive linguistics and beyond is growing steadily aiming to bridge language, culture, and cognition. This volume seeks to address the question regarding what specific roles individual body parts play in the embodied conceptualization of emotions, mental faculties, character traits, cultural values,...

This paper is a cognitive semantic analysis of a CCTV educational commercial, which is one of a series designed and produced in preparation for, and in celebration of, the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Called the “Beijing Opera Episode”, this TV commercial converges on the theme: “To mount the stage of the world, and to put on a show of China”. That...

This paper intends to analyze, within the cognitive linguistic paradigm, the nonverbal and multimodal manifestations of metaphors and metonymies in an educational commercial screened on China Central Television (CCTV). Specifically, it shows how two major conceptual metaphors, LIFE IS A JOURNEY and LIFE IS A STAGE, are manifested in dynamic visual...

This paper studies the Chinese xin 'heart', traditionally conceptualized as the centre for cognitive activities. In Chinese, the word xin, which primarily denotes the heart organ, means both "heart" and "mind" as understood in English, and by metonymic association it can also mean "thoughts; ideas; emotions; feelings". In ancient Chinese philosophy...

Aims and Scope: One of the central themes in cognitive linguistics is the uniquely human development of some higher potential called the "mind" and, more particularly, the intertwining of body and mind, which has come to be known as embodiment. Several books and volumes have explored this theme in length. However, the interaction between culture, b...

The history of mankind has been characterized by attempts to understand the universe and the human being itself. Humans are so uniquely able to understand because they have a "mind" that distinguishes them from lower species. As the centre of some or all of the faculties of feeling, thinking, and knowing, the mind has traditionally been the definin...

A comprehensive collection of essays in multidisciplinary metaphor scholarship that has been written in response to the growing interest among scholars and students from a variety of disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, music and psychology. These essays explore the significance of metaphor in language, thought, culture and ar...

Following the theory of conceptual metaphor in cognitive linguistics, this paper studies a predominant conceptual metaphor in the understanding of the heart in ancient Chinese philosophy: THE HEART IS THE RULER OF THE BODY. The most important conceptual mapping of this metaphor consists in the perceived correspondence between the mental power of th...

Rachel Giora, On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. ix, 259. Hb $55. The goal of this book is to explore the extent to which salient meanings – meanings that are decoded in our mental lexicon and foremost on our mind – affect our speech production and comprehension. “It aims...

This is a study of metonymic and metaphoric expressions containing body-part terms for the eye(s) in Chinese. It also discusses similar expressions in English in order to provide a cross-linguistic perspective. It is found that Chinese and English share the conceptual metonymy perceptual organ stands for perception and the conceptual metaphors seei...

This book presents a semantic study of Chinese physical action verbs from a cognitive perspective. The study seeks to understand the cognitive basis of language by uncovering the relationship between language structure and cognitive structure, and to demonstrate “how cognitive, perceptual, or experiential facts constrain or otherwise determines the...

The theory of conceptual metaphor claims that poetic metaphor basically uses the same cognitive mechanisms as everyday metaphor; and what makes poetic metaphor look different, however, is its extension, elaboration, and combination of those mechanisms in ways that go beyond the ordinary. In light of this claim, the present study focuses on a partic...

This article studies two of the four special cases, namely THINKING IS MOVING and THINKING IS SEEING, that constitute the metaphor system THE MIND IS A BODY in Chinese. An analysis of linguistic data suggests that these two conceptual metaphors are grounded in our common bodily experiences of spatial movement and vision. It shows that the conceptua...

According to the theory of internal organs in traditional Chinese medicine, the gallbladder has the function of making judgments and decisions in mental processes and activities, and it also determines one's degree of courage. This culturally constructed medical characterization of the gallbladder forms the base of the cultural model for the concep...

This study presents a semantic analysis of how emotions and emotional experiences are described in Chinese. It focuses on conventionalized expres-sions in Chinese, namely compounds and idioms, which contain body-part terms. The body-part terms are divided into two classes: those denoting external body parts and those denoting internal body parts or...

This book makes an important contribution to understanding the complexity of the sources of power that govern Chinese politeness behavior in different settings. To answer the question of why Chinese seem to be inconsistent in their politeness behavior, the author conducted ethnographic research in southern China over a period of eight years in the...

This study presents a semantic analysis of how emotions and emotional experiences are described in Chinese. It focuses on conventionalized expressions in Chinese, namely compounds and idioms, which contain body-part terms. The body-part terms are divided into two classes: those denoting external body parts and those denoting internal body parts or...

This study is a semantic analysis of metonymic and metaphoric expressions involving body-part terms for the face in Chinese. These expressions are discussed regarding four perceived roles of face, namely, as highlight of appearance and look, as indicator of emotion and character, as focus of interaction and relationship, and as locus of dignity and...

This article studies 2 Chinese body-part terms zhi 'finger' and zhang 'palm' as they are used in compounds and idioms to express abstract concepts. Primarily, zhi 'finger' is used to express intention, aim, guidance, and direction, whereas zhang 'palm' is used to refer to power and control. The metaphoric and metonymic expressions involved are base...

This article presents a comparative study of metaphorical expressions of anger and happiness in English and Chinese. It demonstrates that English and Chinese share the same central conceptual metaphor "ANGER IS HEAT," which then breaks into two sub-versions in both languages. Whereas English has selected "FIRE" and "FLUID" metaphors, Chinese uses "...