17 November – Zhen Pan
Identification of Metaphors in Emotional Languages
This study first analyzes the linguistic expressions of emotions (like happiness, anger, sadness and so on) both in Chinese and English. It uses traditional Chinese novels like The Story of the Stone, short stories like Stories to Caution the World and English short stories like Sixty-five Short Stories by W. Somerset Maugham and The Complete Works of O. Henry as data. The key step is to identify metaphors in emotional languages and find out how they really work. This way, I try to compare and contrast the Chinese and Western transmissions of emotions.
Meanwhile, this research claims that different emotional constructions can be used to express definite human emotions. The meaning of the emotional constructions derives not only from their emotional words, but also from the constructions themselves. So, this research is also trying to find out how metaphors work in the construction processes of the emotional constructions and in the interaction of the parts in these constructions.