A Comparative Study Of Metaphorical Motivation Of English And Chinese Animal

Vocabulary is an important part of language, it is the emphasis and difficulty in learning alanguage and the idiom is the most important which have rich cultural connotation. There are a lot ofanimals’ words in Chinese and English vocabulary. They are not only used for appellation, also carrythe load rich social historical and cultural information. It takes on the concept of different ethnicgroups, religion, customs and way of life, and so on, thus these idioms an important part of language.The use of animals in the two languages content is multifarious, and how to improve their learningefficiency is an important research subject. Though many scholar engaged in research on this aspect,more explain their differences and cultural connotation from the perspective of cultural comparison,and also there are more and more people study the motivation of idiom from the perspective ofmetaphor, and this paper not only used the knowledge of metaphor, also adopted innovation approach:the prototype image theory to analysis animals’ idiom. Cognitive linguistics focus on similarity oflanguage, and cultural linguistics will gather the national language character. Is there the link betweensimilarity and character? To answer this question, we must combine the two respect s, so this paperintended use cognitive theories to analyze and comprise between English and Chinese animals’ idiom,finding out the regularity, revealing the similarity and difference, and then it will provide direct helpand guidance for our study.