空间、关系与秩序：汉语和卢干达语地址系统中社会认知隐喻的比较研究

Abstract

This study employs a social-cognitive framework based on Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) to comparatively analyze how the address systems in Chinese and Luganda reflect and construct metaphors of space, relationships, and order. Address terms are not only markers of politeness but also linguistic reflections of embodied cognition, encoding social distance, hierarchy, intimacy, status, and group affiliation. This paper analyzes spatial metaphors (vertical "up-down schema" representing status and obedience; horizontal "near-far schema" representing solidarity and closeness), relational metaphors (extending kinship relations to non-kin to promote inclusivity), and order metaphors (social hierarchy as an orderly structure, in-groups as bounded containers). Chinese narrows distance through extended kinship terms (e.g., "gege" [older brother], "jiejie" [older sister]) and marks vertical respect through official titles (e.g., "laoshi" [teacher]) and the polite pronoun "nin." Luganda emphasizes social order based on age, gender, and clan through honorifics "Ssebo"/"Nnyabo" and a classificatory kinship system (e.g., "Taata" extended to paternal uncles, "Ssenga" as cultural mentor). Through cross-cultural comparison, this paper explores whether these patterns arise from universal cognitive structures grounded in human embodied experience or are shaped by specific socio-cultural contexts, aiming to provide references for cognitive linguistics, cross-cultural pragmatics, and de-colonial studies of language. Key words: social-cognitive metaphors; address system; Conceptual Metaphor Theory; Chinese; Luganda; cross-cultural pragmatics