Ancient China relied heavily on farming and textile production. There are many words and expressions related to textile production entering into life domain and keeping influencing our life as well as our cognition of the world around us. People are social groups, involved in this and that relation in the real world. In modern Chinese, it is still common to say marriage as xĭ-jié-lián-lĭ (喜结连理 to tie a knot, to marry), ambition in life as biān-zhī-lí-xiăng (编织理想 to weave dreams), a big crowd as rén-qún-rú-zhī (人群如织 a crowd as weaved together). What’s more, new friends are to be made as jié-jiāo (结交 to make) new friends, and one is very likely to be tied down or qiān-bàn (牵绊 to tie down) by his or her family.

Language is the carrier of a culture, reflecting certain shared cognition. Palmer and Sherifian [1] argued that language was both a cultural activity and an instrument for organizing other cultural domain, and culture structured the interpretation of language. Sharifian [2] referred to the relationship between language and culture as a two-fold one, and stated that language and culture both communicated cultural conceptualizations and meanwhile embodied them. That is, lexical items are understood on the basis of how speakers of a language categorize their experiences, and on the other hand, lexical items are also representations or labels for schemas that are largely culturally constructed. Yu [3] [4] put forward a “circular triangle relationship”, based on his studies of Chinese and comparison between English and Chinese, as shown in Figure 1.

Yu intended to claim that the language form originates from an embodied experience and represents a certain culture, a certain shared cognition. Lakoff and Johnson [5] have found that metaphor prevails in everyday life, both in language and in thought and action. They believe that the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.

In the long history of textile industry, lots of expressions involving thread or string were created and put into repeated use, then became well-used metaphorical patterns and widely accepted by Chinese people. In the meantime, these expressions affect the people’s thought and action, entrenching the Chinese cognition of the surrounding world.

At first, a survey into the textile language in Chinese in the Chinese corpus developed by Beijing University (Center for Chinese Corpus, CCL) [6] is done to gain a general view that there is a rich storage of textile language in Chinese. Then it introduces a cognitive study of the textile language in terms of the image schema of LINK. The third part presents discussion on the ground of textile language in Chinese and the LINK image Schema.

In order to gain a comparatively general view of the textile language in Chinese, a survey of textile expressions is done in the exploration into the Modern Chinese Dictionary [7] .

Chinese characters are well-known for the complicated writing system, for it is not alphabetically based. A Chinese character contains both an indication of pronunciation and an indication of meaning. And a Chinese character is usually

an ideogram, expressing meaning ironically. Almost all of the textile languages are characters of ideograms, taking “纟” (meaning silk, sī 丝) as radicals [8] . Among the 218 characters with “纟” referring to the Modern Chinese Dictionary, those related with LINK and also prevail in modern Chinese are jīng (经warp), wéi (纬weft), xiàn (线thread or string), shéng (绳rope), sī (丝silk), chán (缠twine or tangle), wán (绾tie or coil up), fù (缚bind), băng (绑bind), jì (系bind), jié (结tie or wind), rào (绕roll), biān (编weave), and zhī (织weave). xiàn (线thread or string), shéng (绳rope), and sī (丝silk)refer to the materials used in the textile production, the others like chán (缠twine or tangle), wán (绾tie or coil up), fù (缚bind), băng (绑bind), jì (系bind), jié (结wind), rào (绕roll), biān (编weave), and zhī (织weave) are actions often applied in the production. All the actions mentioned here refer to the combination of two things together. And the opposite actions should also be considered in the present research.

Table 1 demonstrates that the word jié (结tie or wind) is synonymous to chán (缠twine or tangle), wán (绾tie or coil up), fù (缚bind), băng (绑bind), jì (系bind), jié (结tie or wind), rào (绕roll), biān (编weave), and zhī (织weave). And it can be seen as the prototypical term for other verbs. Thus, for a further understanding of metaphorical use of textile expressions, jié (结tie or wind) and its antonym jiě (解unwind or untie) are regarded as the center for the present study.

In Chinese, textile production is called “jīng-tiān-wéi-dì (经天纬地warp as the sky and weft as the earth: an ability to rule the country)” [9] . Weft and warp are two threads involved in textile production. Weft is built one after another by weaving the thread in and out between the warp threads, crossing each one as it

passes by. A thread or string has a starting point and an ending point, like a line segment. The same thread can be cut in the middle or knotted at the ending point, while different threads can be tied together and as well the tie or knot can be untied. What’s more, threads crossing over in order is weaving while threads crossing over in disorder is tangling or intertwining.

The thread or string in the weaving process connects or establish a certain link between objects. Then the engagement and disengagement of link is extended to different objects. According to the definition obtained via Google search engine, a link schema is defined as an image schema that consists of two or more entities, connected physically or metaphorically, and the bond between them.

(1) an image schema of LINK consisting of two entities

For example, in the sentence “解铃还需系铃人 (Whoever started the trouble should end it)”, “系 (tie, knot)” and “解 (untie, unknot)” are opposite actions. A link between two entities is established by tying the bell, while the link is cut off by untying the bell. And in the end of a love story it is always happy to see that the lovers get united in a marriage, in Chinese “喜结姻缘 (to get married)”. Here “结” literally means knit or knot, and the marriage is believed to be destined as “姻缘”. In Chinese the famous saying “千里姻缘一线牵 (a fate match across a thousand miles is drawn by a thread)” indicates that a man and a woman is linked by a fate thread.

(2) an image schema of LINK consisting of more than two entities

For example, in the sentence “她深陷情郎编织的情网无法自拔 (She lost herself in the love net her lover had woven and couldn’t escape it.)”, “编织 (weave, knit)” is usually a textile expression which is defined in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English [10] : to make cloth, a carpet, a basket etc. by crossing threads or thin pieces under and over each other by hand or on a loom. Here the love net is metaphorical conceptualized as a net woven by the lover’s words, facial expressions, acts, and so on. In the sentence “交流会人车交织 (at the fair flows of population and traffic are intertwined.)”, “交织 (interweave, intertwine)” entails the image of a vast crowd and a heavy traffic at the fair, each flow like a thread weaving or interweaving without an order. And the opposites to “编织” or “交织” are usually “解开 (untie)”, “拆开 (unpack)” or “分开 (separate)”, etc.

In essence, thread or string metaphors have prototypical experiential basis in people’s textile production. In ancient time weaving was an essential part of life, thus many weaving concepts were mapped metaphorically onto the concept of life. The art of weaving is fundamental for the understanding of the world we are living in. In ancient times, due to low technology, textile production is closely related with women’s work, such as weaving, knitting, spinning, embroidering, and so on. In the case of the conceptual metaphors involving thread or string in Chinese, they are embodied or experiential-based in textile production.

Textile production has a long history in China or in the human history. In the textile production, the thread or string plays an important role, for a thread can be weaved or knitted into a textile product. Many textile-related expressions, such as jīng-wéi (经纬warp and weft), jié (结a knot, knotting or binding) or jiě (解releasing or undbinding), yī-xiàn (一线a thread of) and yī-sī (一丝a thread of ), etc., enter the life domain.

By looking into the definitions in the Modern Chinese Dictionary and collecting data from Center for Chinese Corpus, it becomes clear that the conceptual metaphors involving thread or string prevail in Chinese and textile production related expressions have a salient experiential basis.

In the process of language development, the expressions extend metaphorically into the life domain, but vary in the degrees of prototypicality. The thread expressions conceptually link two domains, the domain of textile production and the life domain, and enrich the human’s versatile ways of thinking.

Su, Y.J. (2017) Chinese Experiential-Based Conceptual Metaphors in Terms of Thread. Open Access Library Journal, 4: e3749. https://doi.org/10.4236/oalib.1103749