A Cognitive Study of Spatial Metaphors in English “Deep” and Chinese “Shen”

This paper presents an analysis and comparison of the projection of Chinese “shen” and English “deep” from the spatial domain to other domains of time, sense, emotion, behavior, and society from a cognitive perspective by using the comparative and contrastive method, explaining the universality and differences of SHEN and DEEP in the metaphorical domain concerning their collocation, usage, and frequency under Chinese and English cultural contexts, which serves as an insight for foreign language teaching, translation practice and cross-cultural communication. The results show that since humans share a similar physical structure and living environment, the spatial adjectives “deep” and “shen” show a lot of similarities. However, the usage, collocation, and frequency of use of “deep” and “shen” still reveal some variations, which might have great implications for second language learning and teaching.