Investigating Up-Down and Related Metaphors
201M048 Y. T.
This thesis is a study of the orientational and related metaphors. These metaphors are influenced by our recognition of our daily life. And we cannot live without using these metaphors. There are many such metaphors around us. And I also studied other metaphors such as the Light-Heavy, the Big-Small and Long-Short that are closely intertwined with the Up-Down.
In the first chapter I made an attempt to give rough features of the metaphor using the Up-Down orientation referring to its examples. We can say that it is usual that with this metaphor the Up orientation gives something oriented Up a positive meaning while the Down gives something oriented Down a negative meaning.
In the second chapter I discussed the orientational metaphor and its expressions in English and came to recognize that the Up-Down orientation not only implies goodness or badness generally but it is closely related with the concepts such as health, feeling and quality. But what is interesting here is that when the Up-Down orientational metaphor is related with quantity, it can work in the opposite way. In such cases the Up orientation is associated with a negative meaning and the Down a positive meaning.
In the third chapter the Up-Down orientational metaphor used in Japanese was dealt with through the observation of its examples. What I found here were very similar to those I found in English in chapter two. In Japanese too, the Up direction expresses a good meaning and the Down direction is associated with a bad meaning. I tried to discover differences in the use of the Up-Down orientational metaphor between the two languages but could not obtain very striking and significant differences. As I observed, the Up-Down orientational metaphor seems to be deeply grounded in human daily experiences, that is to say, physical bodily experiences with the outer world. This seems a major reason why this metaphor is working very similarly both in English and in Japanese.
In the fourth chapter I investigated a number of metaphors that are different from the Up-Down orientational metaphor but seem to be linked with it. They are Light-Heavy, Big-Small and Long-Short metaphors. As we have seen, usually the concepts Light, Big and Long are metaphorically used to grasp good things while those of Heavy, Small and Short to grasp things negatively. Of the three metaphors the Light-Heavy and the Big-Small can be considered very closely linked with the Up-Down orientational metaphor. The linkage seems natural because we can easily imagine that something light can float in the air and something big is usually large not only horizontally but also vertically. The other one, that is, the Long-Short metaphor does not seem to be as closely linked with the Up-Down orientational metaphor as the first two. This will probably be because the concepts Long and Short are related with the horizontal measurement and not directly related with the vertical Up-Down measurement. Even so, we can say that the Long-Short metaphor is in some sense related with the Up-Down orientational metaphor and the concept Long is metaphorically associated with a positive understanding of things around us and the concept Short with their negative understanding. At any rate, it can be said that here between these four metaphors there are very interesting relationships and I tried to investigate them in chapter four.
I know that I could not investigate completely. There should be more interesting reason to our recognition. It should be related to our mind. So if there is an opportunity, I will try to investigate more detail.