從譬喻看文化：語言之認知研究

What Can Metaphors Tell Us About Culture?

人類思考及推理的本質可經由檢視語言中譬喻的用法得知。將譬喻視為人類思考及認知之重要語言機制，乃Lakoff 與Johnson（1980）的主要論點之一。他們認為了解譬喻必須了解本體（source）與客體（target）間的映照關係。本研究針對中文語料中「思想為食物」（THOUGHT AS FOOD）的譬喻使用，企圖了解中文裡以食物為本體，思想（含抽象之概念及具體之語言文字）的譬喻使用。研究顯示，此譬喻在中文大抵經由四個不同的命題結構（proposition-schema）所建構而成。在不同的語言中，相同的譬喻可經由不同的命題結構來建構。即令二個語言以相同的命題結構建構某一譬喻，其仰賴各命題結構的程度及使用的頻率也不盡相同。研究隱喻的映照模式因此可以反映出文化之本質。映照所藉以完成之命題結構可用來作為不同文化模式的依據，進而反映出不同文化之間的差異性。

Recent studies on metaphor have proved it to be an important language device that reflects the cognitive source of human thinking. These experientialists claimed that metaphors in our languages mirror our ordinary conceptual system and treat metaphors as conventionalized cognitive structure. Adopting the experientialists’ view of interpreting metaphor cognitively as a mapping relation from a source domain to a target domain (Lakoff 1990), the present study explores how metaphors reflect different cultural information by investigating conceptual metaphors about MARRIAGE and THOUGHT AS FOOD in current Chinese. Using corpus data, we find that some of the familiar metaphors with which Chinese conceptualize marriage reflect cognitively the current Chinese view of marriage―MARRIAGE IS AN ONGOING JOURNEY, MARRIAGE IS BUSINESS, MARRIAGE IS GAMBLING, and MARRIAGE IS BONDING. Among the four, the conceptualization of MARRIAGE AS BUSINESS at 59.3% outweigh the others. As for the metaphor THOUGHT AS FOOD, four proposition-schemas are identified to be at work in our conceptualization: THE CONTENT OF THOUGHT IS THE INGREDIANT OF FOOD, THE QUALITY OF THOUGHT IS THE FLAVOR OF FOOD, THE FORMATION OF THOUGHT IS THE PREPARATION OF FOOD, THE COMPREHENSION OF THOUGHT IS THE DIGESTION OF FOOD. Such conceptual mappings match syntactic manifestations in terms of grammatical categories, which may bear theoretical significance for the study of metaphor.