Metaphor has long been studied both in the western world and in China. From the viewpoint of the contemporary metaphorical theory, many of our fundamental concepts are structured through spatial metaphors rooted in our physical, social and cultural experiences. Cognitive linguists view knowledge, including linguistic knowledge, as arising out of people's interaction with the world, and among this knowledge, the primacy is given to space. The reason is that spatial relations are relatively concrete as they are the relationships that are most direct to us human beings and thus most easily accessible. Space serves as a fundamental conceptual structuring device in language. It is served as a category with which human beings interact with their environment. Meanwhile, spatial terms are often used in fundamentally non-spatial domains, through metaphorical mapping, lending a spatial structure to the non-spatial domains. This paper focuses on the linguistic expressions of spatial metaphors from a cognitive approach.
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