A Corpus-based Contrastive Study on Metaphors of “yan/Salt” in Chinese and English

Ting YAN, Junzi ZHOU

Abstract


Salt, as one of the most indispensable factors in daily life, also plays a significant role in everyday language. Taking salt as the topic, this paper aims to summarize the similarities and differences between the metaphors of salt in Chinese and English, and to examine the reasons behind. This paper chooses BCC (Beijing Language and Culture University Corpus) and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), and then divides the first 1000 entries from corpus into serval target domains based on the theory of metaphor. There are three major findings: metaphors of salt have four common target domains in both languages; the target domains in English is more abundant and positive than in Chinese; the differences between metaphors of salt in Chinese and in English mainly brought about by living environment, religious and cultural factors.

Keywords


Salt; Metaphor; Corpus

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/11802

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