Language Is World－A cognitive look at relevant Chinese and English metaphors

Metaphor is the main cognitive means of humankind with its essence being creating new concepts by mapping the familiar or concrete concepts onto unfamiliar or abstract ones. In accordance with the metaphor theory of cognitive linguistics, this paper systematically investigates into the metaphor LANGUAGE IS WORLD in both Chinese and English languages, and finds that both languages are often similarly conceptualized as space, human beings and physical things, with the last type being the most abundant, which reveals the common metaphorical thought shared by both Chinese and English people.