The Moral Metaphor System

Abstract This book presents a study of moral metaphors in English and Chinese, applying cognitive linguistics’ conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) to a comparative study of linguistic manifestation of the moral metaphor system rooted in the domains of bodily and physical experience. It intends to shed light on the metaphorical nature of moral cognition and how it is systematically manifested in language. The study sets out with the central goal to contribute to the discovery of potential commonalities that define moral cognition in general as well as the detection of possible differences that characterize distinct cultures concerning moral cognition. It probes into 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 under study is taken as consisting of three major subsystems, named in a shorthand fashion as “physical”, “visual”, and “spatial”. The three 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 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 in networks; the latter refers to the need that metaphors should be studied in such networks.