Abstract:
The process of semantic formation is a process of conceptualization and language is simply the representation of conceptual structure. There are differences in linguistic representation of basic metaphorical concepts including domains of time, social place and action feature, for instance, the concepts of “upwardness and downwardness”. It is the differences in historical culture, geographic features, cognitive mode and habit of language thinking between the Chinese and English nations that result in their distinctive conceptual structures, which lead to the asymmetry in language expression of spatial metaphor.
