A Contrastive Study Of Cultural Mechanism On Plant Metaphors Construal In Chinese And English

Metaphor is a cognitive phenomenon that one thing is understood and experienced in terms of another.It is deeply rooted in culture.Plants are so common in human life that they are influenced heavily by different cultures,deriving many plant metaphors with robust cultural features in different languages.So the research object is Chinese and English plant metaphors,including context-independent flora words with cultural connotations and those context-dependent figurative phrases related to plants in the two cultures.Previous studies tend to discuss cultural differences of plant metaphors from a semantic or cross-cultural perspective.They have not further clarified the core connotation of plant metaphors.Comparing the construal processes of plant metaphors in these two languages may help us understand how the different cognitive modes and cultural psychology influence the process and establish the cultural mechanism in the construal processes of plant metaphors.The similarities and differences of plant metaphors in a different culture can also be further clarified through the mechanism.So,the primary objective of this research is to discover the cultural mechanism in the construal processes of Chinese and English plant metaphors,further clarifying the similarities and differences influenced by culture in these metaphors.This thesis took the Annotation Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model(ADRIM)as the basis of the analytical framework,established the analytical framework for the cultural mechanism inside the construal processes of plant metaphors through the qualitative analyses of the construal processes of frequently used Chinese and English plant metaphors based on previous related studies and data.According to former analyses,the thesis establishes a cultural mechanism around the life signs of plants from the possible feature abstraction of the original framework.The mechanism further discusses the cultural influence of two different types of possible features on plants.Then,the new framework is further tested on classified Chinese and English plant metaphors with multiple layers and from different angles to discuss different types of cultural factors with different socio-cultural connotations.The study shows that the cultural mechanism concentrated on the life signs of plants can further explain the differences and similarities of Chinese and English plant metaphors.The most prominent cultural factors that take effect in the mechanism includes three different types,which can be roughly represented as follows: the cultural recognition that defines the general cognition about specific plants in one culture,the cultural value that reflects the value system of common sense in the culture,and the cultural activity that links with human activities such as historical events,myths,religions and some other influence.In conclusion,Chinese culture tends to take plants as living creatures closer to humans or animals.Chinese plant metaphors often reflect the growth habits of plants as a whole.The recognition of plants is more positive and admiring.The symbolic feature inherited by certain plants often relates to the historical event in Chinese culture.English culture holds a relatively narrow perspective about plants,tends to take plants as lifeless objects.English plant metaphors focus more on the physical feature of parts of the plants.The recognition of plants is also relatively negative.Symbolic features inherited by plants are mainly influenced by religion and myths.The study may help to further enrich the cultural mechanism inside the construal process from the Cognitive Linguistic perspective.It may also help establish a systematic view about the similarities and differences between the plant metaphors in different cultures,push the studies about cognition of metaphor,cognition of culture,and other cross-cultural studies further,deepening cultural communication.