认知语言学视角下汉英“上/下”和Up/Down的隐喻意义对比研究

A Comparative Study of the Metaphorical Meanings of “Shàng/Xià” in Chinese and “Up/Down” in English from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics

摘要: 隐喻在我们的生活中无处不在。概念隐喻理论主张隐喻是一种思维方式，是人类认知的基石。空间隐喻是认知隐喻中的重要组成部分，是许多抽象概念构建的基础。方位词“上/下”和up/down作为两对基本空间方位范畴，其空间意义通过隐喻投射到数量、时间、状态、社会地位等非空间域，形成丰富的隐喻表达。本文从认知语言学视角出发，借助美国当代英语语料库(COCA)和北京大学中国语言学研究中心语料库(CCL)，对汉英“上/下”与up/down的隐喻意义进行对比研究。研究发现，汉英两种语言中“上/下”和up/down均存在大量的空间方位隐喻，主要投射至时间域、数量域、状态域、社会地位域、程度域和道德域等目标域；汉英方位隐喻既存在基于共同身体体验的认知共性，也存在由文化差异导致的个性差异；其隐喻认知模式可归纳为基于身体体验相似性的隐喻认知模式和创造相似性的隐喻认知模式两类。

Abstract: Metaphor is ubiquitous in our lives. Conceptual Metaphor Theory holds that metaphor is a mode of thought and a cornerstone of human cognition. Spatial metaphor constitutes an important component of conceptual metaphor and provides a basis for the construction of many abstract concepts. As two pairs of basic spatial-orientational categories, the Chinese terms “shàng/xià” and the English terms up/down extend their spatial meanings metaphorically into non-spatial domains such as quantity, time, state, and social status, thereby giving rise to a rich variety of metaphorical expressions. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this study conducts a comparative analysis of the metaphorical meanings of “shàng/xià” in Chinese and up/down in English, drawing on data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the corpus developed by the Center for Chinese Linguistics at Peking University (CCL). The findings show that both “shàng/xià” and up/down exhibit a large number of spatial-orientational metaphors, which are primarily mapped onto target domains such as time, quantity, state, social status, degree, and morality. Chinese and English orientational metaphors display both cognitive commonalities grounded in shared bodily experience and language-specific differences arising from cultural variation. Their metaphorical cognitive patterns can be classified into two types: those based on similarities in bodily experience and those based on created similarities.