This is the book review of NingYu's monograph.

What is it about?

Ning Yu’s thoughtfully structured book is undoubtedly a big leap forward in metaphor studies. It presents well-organized analyses of three subsystems of moral metaphors with qualitative and quantitative analyses of lexical and corpus-based approaches both in English and Chinese. Thus, the book should appeal to anyone interested in the study of CMT as well as English and Chinese culture. Moreover, the decompositional approach (DAMCA) is really helpful in distinguishing betweenprimary and complex metaphors.

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Why is it important?

The book consists of seven chapters, beginning with a brief introduction of the relation between moral cognition and embodied metaphor. The author addresses the reasons why morality is one of the most common target domains of conceptual metaphors (Kövecses 2010) and why, indeed, moral cognition is metaphorical in the first place (Johnson 2014), demonstrating that metaphors can be highly embodied and at the same time are rooted in their cultural environment (p10). This chapter also introduces the focus of the book – the three subsystems of moral metaphor, includingthe abstract target concepts MORAL and IMMORAL and the three source conceptsPHYSICALITY, VISUALITY as well as SPATIALITY from the bodily and physical domain.

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