A Sweet and Painful Emotional Experience: Love Metaphors from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

More and more researchers have begun to study the conceptual metaphor from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, and to connect the metaphor with language, culture and people’s lives. The Emotional metaphor is an important aspect of cognitive linguistics, and love is an important emotion shared by all human beings. The study is an attempt to examine and compare how metaphorical expressions of love are employed in the texts of English and in the Chinese literary texts. The findings show that several love metaphors are shared in English texts and in Chinese literary texts that are based on common cognitive experiences. However, although many other different cultures also influence the linguistic expressions related to love metaphors, this study identifies specific love metaphors unique to English texts and to Chinese literary texts.