Cognitive perspective of metaphors in Chinese Hua'er folksongs

Abstract

The cognitive frame and transferences from sources to targets of metaphor study have been evident in humanities. The present article aims to compare Chinese heritage Hua'er folksongs, Chinese new poetry, Chinese prose, Chinese news reportage, and Chinese news editorials. By adopting the indicator I1, the results show that the A = B metaphor is typically representative of Chinese Hua'er folksongs. At a more detailed level of comparison of the a-index, heritage folksong Hua'er bears the lowest level of metaphoricity for its repeated use of the metaphorical lexis both in the target domain and source domain. The genre-specific metaphorical expressions in Chinese poetic texts show that the higher a-index is, the more metaphoricity and more cognitive the effort will be. The nominalized metaphorical expressions in heritage Hua'er might limit the working memory constraints and the cognitive mastery of source-to-target structure for the singers to create metaphors.