A Comparative Study of English and Chinese Metaphors of Happiness from the Perspective of Cognition

Traditionally,metaphor has been regarded as figures of speech,i.e.as more or less ornamental devices used in rhetorical style,while modern metaphor theory treats it as a cognitive phenomenon,a significant way of thinking.It is an activity which allows people to comprehend or explain the experience of another domain by virtue of that of a certain domain.A comparative study of emotion metaphors in English and Chinese from the perspective of cognition is to support the contemporary cognitive theory of metaphor from the view points of both English and Chinese cultures,which also reinforces and develops some theories of the contemporary cognitive approach to metaphor:abstract conceptions are comprehended through metaphor;conceptual metaphor,at least emotion conceptual metaphor,is characterized by cognitive universality and cultural diversity.