Mapping in Thought and Language as Evidenced in Chinese

The recent studies on metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Johnson 1987; Lakoff & Turner 1989; Sweetser 1990) have proved it to be an important language device that reflects the cognitive source of human thinking. These experientialists claim that metaphors in our languages mirror our ordinary conceptual system and treat metaphors as conventionalized cognitive structure. Adopting the experientialists’ view of interpreting metaphor cognitively as a mapping relation from a source domain to a target domain (Lakoff 1990), the present study explores how metaphors reflect different cultural models by investigating the conceptual metaphor of THOUGHT AS FOOD in current Chinese. With the data taken from spoken corpus as well as from the balance corpus by the Academia Sinica, we examine the metaphor THOUGHT AS FOOD. Four preposition-schemas are identified to be at work in our conceptualization: THE CONTENT OF THOUGHT IS THE INGREDI* Dr. Su is a professor in the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at National Taiwan University. ** This paper has been revised based on comments received at the Conference on Linguistic Creativity of Taiwan (臺灣語言學的創造力學術研討會) held on Jan 14-15, 2000. I am grateful to those participants who provided me with interesting examples, in Chinese as well as in other languages. I’m also grateful to those who benefited me with their keen linguistic insights. Their comments have been well taken and the paper has been revised accordingly.