4.2 Differences in Metaphorical Extensions and Meanings of "shallow" and “Qian”(浅) 14

5. Conclusion 16

5.1 Findings of the Study 16

5.2 Limitations and Prospects of the Study 17

References 18

1. Introduction 

1.1 Background and Objectives

    Aristotle(1954) said in his work, “The Rhetoric”, that metaphors make learning pleasant: "To learn easily is naturally pleasant to all people, and words signify something, so whatever words create knowledge in us are the pleasantest." Traditional rhetoric regards metaphor as a language phenomenon which is used to embellish expressions. At present, metaphor has developed from traditional rhetoric to a variety of other research fields and subjects, including linguistics, cognitive science, translatology, foreign language teaching and literary criticism. The global upsurge of studies of metaphor from different perspectives indicates that people have gradually realized the great significance of metaphor which exactly contributes to human cognition. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson(1980) presented conceptual metaphor and started the cognitive study of metaphorical system. They argued that metaphors were pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but also in thought and action. A common definition of a metaphor can be described as a comparison that shows how two things that are not alike in most ways are similar in another important way. 

    Lakoff(1980) viewed that human ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which they both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. He believed that human conceptual system is constructed on the basis of specific concepts. Humans comprehend abstract concepts with the help of understanding of concrete and clear concepts. In the early stage of human society, people developed the ability of spatial cognition firstly in order to survive. Humans received the most immediate and elementary experience from the cognition of space. Therefore, spatial domain is the basic cognitive domain of human. Taking spatial concept as the source domain, people project spatial relation into more abstract concepts to understand them. In this way, spatial metaphor comes into being. 

    Since the start of cognitive study of metaphorical system, spatial metaphor has got its popularity. A great number of researches have been made about it at home and abroad. In our country, researches of spatial metaphors have also come out in an unending flow in the last few years. They relate to the essence, features, types, functions and intercultural matters of spatial metaphor. 

    To sum up, the present study of spatial metaphor has achieved a high level and is still developing. Besides, the tendency of metaphor studies is to combine it with dimensional adjectives, at the same time, studying metaphorical system of other languages. There is the current trend of comparing space dimensional words in different cultures and exploring their meanings and metaphorical extensions respectively as well as analyzing their similarities and differences.   

    Scholars have done specific comparisons and researches about “Shen”(深) and “deep” with plentiful and substantial findings. However, as for their antonyms, seldom researches has done about “Qian”(浅) and “shallow”. Except in some essays, metaphorical meanings of both “Shen”(深) and “Qian”(浅) and their English equivalents are analyzed roughly. Besides, the analysis of instances and data are not enough and the frequency of each meaning and target domains are ignored. What is more, the conclusions are limited to the significance of metaphor and metonymy, and reasons of differences. There remains a room in the study of words’ metaphorical extensions.