Cognitive Analysis of Human-Metaphor Denomination

Abstract

here exists a lexical phenomenon in the Chinese language that the words containing “human-related” morphemes are used to refer to “things” with the metaphorical meaning. This paper names this as human-metaphor denomination.
The paper analyses the emergence of the lexical phenomenon from two perspectives: one from the metaphorical perspective, is the forming of the result of mapping from source domain “human” to target domain “things”; the other from traditional cultural Cognitive psychology of the Chinese.