An Inquiry into the Chinese-English Zeugma Motivations within the Scope of Experientialist-Cultural Dual Dimensions

It is reasonable to treat the traditional figure zeugma as metaphor, a central human thinking mode and an inherent cognitive path, based on which the profound production and comprehension procedures behind are calculated.Zeugma, on the surface, runs contrary to commonsense or to semantic restrictions, leading to logical tensions.It is these tensions that symbolize appearance and markedness of zeugma, as a subrealm of cognitive metaphor.The essentials of zeugma lie in rediscovering resemblance of two parties involved in the superficial tensions and resulting in the emergent meanings.Through comparison among cross-language micro-aspects, it is found that there exist similarities and divergences of zeugma between Chinese and English.The homoplasy of two language-speakers' bodily experiences is responsible for the commonnesses, while the cultural models in the East and West are the main factors resulting in distinctive identities.