The Moral Metaphor System A Conceptual Metaphor Approach

This book investigates moral metaphors in English and Chinese, applying conceptual metaphor theory to a comparative study of the linguistic manifestation of the moral metaphor system rooted in the domains of bodily and physical experience. Ning Yu sheds light on the metaphorical nature of moral cognition and how it is systematically manifested in language, and explores the potential commonalities that define moral cognition in general, as well as the differences that characterize distinct cultures. The work investigates moral cognition at the cultural level as reflected in language, based on linguistic evidence from both English and Chinese and, to a limited extent, multimodal evidence from the corresponding cultures. The moral metaphor system is taken to consist of three major subsystems, referred to as "physical", "visual", and "spatial". These subsystems are clusters of conceptual metaphors, whose source concepts are from domains of embodied experiences in the physical world, and which are formulated in contrastive categories with bipolar values for the target concepts of moral and immoral. The study is characterized by two keywords: system and systematicity: The former refers to the fact that metaphors (conceptual and linguistic) are connected within networks, and the latter to the need for those metaphors to be studied in such networks.

Ning Yu, Applied Linguistics and Asian Studies, The Pennsylvania State University

Ning Yu is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Asian Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. His research interests lie in the relationship between language, culture, and cognition, cognitive linguistics, and the cognitive approach to metaphor studies. His publications include The
Contemporary Theory of Metaphor: A Perspective from Chinese (Benjamins 1998), The Chinese HEART in a Cognitive Perspective: Culture, Body, and Language (de Gruyter 2009), and From Body to Meaning in Culture: Papers on Cognitive Semantic Studies of Chinese (Benjamins 2009). He is co-editor of the
book series "Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts" and of the International Journal of Chinese Linguistics.