On The Representation Of Animal Metaphors In English And Chinese Learner’s Dictionary

Metaphor,as the basic way of thinking and cognition,arises from the bodily experience of human beings.In the close relationship with animals during the long co-existing period,people have acquired various cognitive experience about animals,which creates animal metaphors.There are a large number of idioms employing animal images for expression purposes in both English and Chinese and much of human behavior can be metaphorically understood in terms of animals.However,due to the differences in life experience and culture,there are variations in animal metaphors in English and Chinese,which cause obstacles for learners in comprehension and acquisition of animal-related metaphorical expressions.Since animal idioms are one of the typical linguistic expressions embodying animal metaphors,this thesis,taking animal idioms as the case study,makes efforts to investigate conceptual metaphors in animal idioms and explores how to represent animal metaphors in English-Chinese Learner‘s dictionaries so as to facilitate acquisition.Grounded on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory,this thesis first discusses the cognitive mechanism of animal metaphors in animal–related idioms.Through the data analysis from idiom dictionaries and corpora,it is found that there is a primary conceptual metaphor in animal idioms: HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS.In addition,there also exists a subtype: ABSTRACT THINGS ARE ANIMALS.And animal metaphors are formed through systematic mappings based on the physical similarity and the psychological similarity between source and target domain.Accordingly,there are mainly two types of metaphorical mappings: one is the mapping of animal‘s intrinsic property and the other is that of its cultural property,which include appearance,behavior,living habits and characters etc.It is these mappings that form the semantic system of animal metaphors.Because of the cultural differences in English and Chinese which lead to different metaphorical mappings,Chinese EFL learners without metaphorical competence have difficulties in acquisition of animal metaphors.Therefore,it is necessary to make a cultural-specific representation of animal metaphors in ECLDs.However,through an investigation of four current ECLDs based on the sample analysis of idioms containing five basic categories of animal images,it reveals that there are still deficiencies in the representation of animal metaphors in ECLDs.Deficiencies can be found in the following aspects including lack of explicit guidance on animal metaphors,unsatisfactory cultural specific treatments and the incomplete construction of semantic network of animal metaphor system in particular.Besides,MECD,despites its innovation in setting of metaphor boxes,still pays little attention to animal metaphors.There leaves a lot to be desired.Finally,based on the characteristics of animal metaphors in animal idioms,a representation framework for idiom-related animal metaphors is proposed.And concrete measures in ECLDs are put forward from macrostructure,microstructure and mediostructure which mainly include the explicit explanation of animal metaphors,equivalents,cultural specific information,warning notes and cross references for semantic network of animal metaphors respectively.Furthermore,sample entries of animal idioms are presented taking the category of domesticated animals as examples.The proposed new framework is in the hope of promoting learner‘s acquisition of animal metaphors and fostering their metaphorical competence.At the same time,it can be useful in advancing domestic compiling practice of ECLDs.