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PAGE An Intercultural Study of Conceptual Metaphor in English and ChineseTaking Love Metaphor as an Example PAGE PAGE 7 第 PAGE 7 页 共 NUMPAGES 7 页 1 Definitions of Metaphor Theories of metaphor have come and gone without shedding much light on their roles in cognition and communication until recently when the study of metaphor has moved from primarily literary and philosophical territory to the realms of cognitive linguistics, and other cognitive disciplines. As more and more about human conceptual system have been learned, the essential roles played by metaphorical thought have become more evident. The idea of the abstract concepts such as love, time or the meanings of scientific observations are found to be conveyed by calling upon language and conceptions normally used in speaking and thinking about more concrete experiences.（常宗林，英汉隐喻文化学） 1.1 Traditional and new definitions In traditional rhetoric, metaphor is defined as the comparison of dissimilar things or as the transference and it names one thing in terms of another. The great philosopher Aristotle mostly had the same idea. Metaphor is defined in this way, “Metaphor is, for most people, a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish― a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words…” (G. Lakoff, and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By). It can express one’s idea more effectively and vividly as a device. Conventional metaphors are pervasive in everyday language and we are always using them without knowing them. Metaphor has been extended to a larger scope again and again, especially in the recent 20 or more years. From the theory of cognitive science, we can know that “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another”. (Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M., Metaphors We Live By) Defined in this way, metaphor is a complex phenomenon of language and t