METAPHOR AND METONYMY IN INTERACTION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF BODY-PART EXPRESSIONS IN ENGLISH AND CHINESE

Within the framework of Contemporary cognition, metaphor and metonymy are both viewed as a way of thinking rather than only a matter of language. In this paper, non-literal senses of “gut” in both Chinese and English are studied quantitatively and qualitatively with the aid of corpora under the guidance of cognitive theories. The findings show that non-literal uses of “gut” across two languages account for a substantial proportion of its corpus citations; the metonymic expressions of “gut” in both languages are more than metaphoric ones, and a number of non-literal notions of “gut” are generated by conceptual interplay between metonymy and metaphor; universal bodily experience can motivate equivalent expressions across two languages, but gut is hardly observed as an internal organ, and the cognitive process is complex, which will result in different expressions of gut for cultural and linguistic reasons.