Some Conceptual Metaphors for ju 句 in Early Traditional Chinese Linguistics

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) is unanimously con-sidered to be the founding contribution to the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT): its main tenet is that metaphors are not merely a literary trope, but one of the fundamental tools of the mind by means of which we categorize and understand reality. Among the conceptual systems to which CMT has been applied in research by later cognitivists, com-munication, language, and in some cases sentence and its (grammatical) structures, have been the subject of much debate. Several scholars (such as Michael Reddy 1979, Joseph Grady 1998 and Irene Mittelberg 2002) have formulated a number of conceptual meta-phors for language, grammar, and sentence: the most frequently occurring of these are LINGUISTIC EXPRESSION IS A CONTAINER, LANGUAGE IS A BUILDING, and LANGUAGE IS A TREE. The primary metaphors lying beneath these conceptual metaphors are able to de-scribe language and sentence as CONSTITUENTS ARE CONTENTS and ORGANIZATION IS A PHYSICAL STRUCTURE. The present paper will try to verify whether these metaphors are present in Chinese discourse on language and grammar or whether, on the contrary, dif-ferent conceptual metaphors are employed. The goal is to formulate hypotheses on the conceptual metaphors underlying grammatical notions in traditional Chinese linguistic texts dealing with grammatical issues; this will also shed new light on Chinese grammat-ical investigation and its development. The target of this study will be the terminology for grammar developed in Chinese and, in particular, the terms used to refer to the notion of ju 句 “sentence” and its inner structures.