Intercultural Communication Studies XVII: 1 2008 Yang A Holographic Study of Metaphors Concerning Love in Chinese

This paper aims to make a thorough analysis of love metaphors in Chinese. Based on the conceptual study of emotional metaphors by Lakoff, Kovecses and others, this paper structures a conceptual metaphor of “love ” in Chinese and reveals an understanding of its characteristics and cultural models. For the convenience of discussion, categorization of love in Chinese and a prototype model are first introduced. Second, this paper presents the cultural-specific characteristics by giving a diachronic study of love metaphors in Chinese from the perspectives of historical development and ideology, especially in the era of globalization when abundant metaphors concerning love are coined or introduced from the other languages. And the newly-born expressions in a sense reflect the degree of people’s emotional openness and changes in aspects of traditional cultural modals and values, the awareness of which helps to enhance understanding in cross-cultural communication and promote interpersonal relations, as well as social harmony. Love is an eternal topic, whether in daily life or in literary works, or in films, which are universal and complex. Due to certain cultural contexts or specific geography, love has it