A Metaphorical Study of the Personified Chinese Flower Words

As a cognitive thinking mode, metaphor is a ubiquitous phenomenon. Metaphorical expressions abound in Chinese daily vocabulary, embodying the national living environments, customs, and social cultures. Taking cognitive metaphor as its theoretical framework, the paper makes a systematic analysis of the modern Chinese flower names that manifest human postures and facial expressions, behavior characteristics, social relations, and moral virtues, and highlights the Chinese people's poetical cognition and interpretation of the mutual revelations between flowers and human beings. It is of theoretical and practical value for promoting the teaching about flower words, compiling dictionaries, and propagating the Chinese flower culture.