A Contrastive Study of Spatial Metaphors of “Up/Down” in Envglish and “Shang/Xia” in Chinese

Metaphors play an important role in human language and thinking, and their cognitive essence is gradually highlighted in the perspective of cognitive linguistics. In the perspective of cognitive linguistics, spatial metaphor is a fundamental and crucial type of metaphor, defined as a way of thinking that uses specific spatial conceptual domains to interpret abstract conceptual domains. This paper takes the spatial metaphor of “up/down” as an example to compare its similarities and differences in Chinese and English languages from the perspectives of quantity, time, state and status domains. Exploring these similarities and differences in depth can help reveal the laws of human cognition, understand the close connection between language and culture, promote cross-cultural communication, provide rich materials and new perspectives for interdisciplinary research, and explore more directional metaphorical phenomena and the dynamic evolution of metaphors in different cultures and languages.