Spatial Metaphors for Morality: A Perspective from Chinese

ABSTRACT

This study aims to contribute to the research on spatial metaphors for morality from the perspective of Chinese. It outlines the linguistic patterns in Chinese that manifest the putative underlying spatial subsystem of moral metaphors, which can be summarized by a central metaphor “MORALITY IS SPATIALITY.” In doing so, it focuses on 17 spatial words that instantiate in real-life discourses five pairs of moral–spatial metaphors in their positive and negative valence. The total of 10 metaphors under study forms a cluster as the spatial metaphor subsystem operating in conjunction and connection with other metaphor subsystems in our moral cognition. It is suggested that the 10 conceptual metaphors emerge from four image schemas: UP-DOWN, BALANCE, PATH, and OBJECT. A unified schematic configuration is proposed to lay out the spatial elements and relations represented by the four image schemas in a single diagram. Based on its linguistic analysis, the study also provides a list of prototypical target aspects of MORAL and IMMORAL onto which the source concepts of the 10 moral–spatial metaphors are mapped. The list reflects a division of labor, although with some overlaps, among the 10 metaphors under study. Finally, the study conducts a decompositional analysis of two moral–spatial metaphors as examples showing how deeper analyses of metaphors can be achieved.

Acknowledgments

I am very thankful to Ray Gibbs and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful and helpful reviews of this article.

Notes

¹ HYDCD treats báo as a variant of bó in pronouncing 薄. For this study I consulted three dictionaries, HYDCD, XDHYCD, and XXDHYCD, for lexical senses of the words, and XSDHYDCD for their English translations. These four dictionaries are listed in the appendix. The English translations of all the sentential examples, rather literal on purpose, are my own.

² As far as the human body is concerned, the UP-DOWN, as well as FRONT-BACK, asymmetry is obvious while the LEFT-RIGHT asymmetry is far less so. In terms of function, however, the LEFT-RIGHT asymmetry is clear in people’s right versus left-handedness. See Casasanto (2014) for distinction between left- and right-handers in terms of bodily relativity and spatial mapping of valence. It seems that the LEFT-RIGHT distinction is chiefly deployed in the political domain in modern Chinese, with LEFT for the revolutionary (positive unless “ultra-left”) versus RIGHT for the reactionary (negative). In older strata of Chinese, however, LEFT indeed represents the negative valence (HYDCD, p. 509), and RIGHT the positive (HYDCD, p. 793), in the moral domain.