Comparative Study Of English Proverbs

The proverb is ubiquitous in all human languages. They are the essence of the different languages, the accumulation of the human experience and crystallization of the wisdom of the people in their daily life and labor. Deeply rooted in the higher order cognitive structure, they can reflect the cognitive psychological basis of the nations.Influenced by the traditional linguistics and structural linguistics, the former research on Chinese and English proverbs focuses on the formal and cultural features, that is to say, the structure, rhetoric and culture in proverbs. Proverb cognition is little concerned.The dissertation discusses the typological features of the English and Chinese proverbs through a contrastive analysis of the similarities and differences in rhyme, grammar and words, expounds cognitive and generative mechanism and cultural foundation of proverb comprehension from the cognitive viewpoint, analyzes semantic structure and characteristics and places a great emphasis on the cognitive mechanism of proverb comprehension and application by adopting the contemporary theory of metaphor.After a review of the literature about the study of the English and Chinese proverbs, we put forth a new stand, integrate conceptual metaphor and blending space into a unified frame and further set up theanalytic frame in the study of proverbs in cognitive linguistics. In the dissertation, proverbs are considered as a special language phenomenon and expression that extensively exist in most of the languages in the world. Most of them are based on metaphorical conceptualizations, resulted from cognition and deeply rooted in national culture. Based on the cognitive linguistics and especially the metaphor theory, the dissertation explores the figurative interpretation of the typical proverbs in Chinese and English. Three aspects will be detailed as follows:First, proverbs are a language phenomenon. After a review of the literature on the former outcomes, a careful description and analysis of the structural, rhyming, lexical and semantic features is made in this dissertation. We think that, as a kind of metaphor of bound meaning, proverbs are classified as literal and metaphorical ones according to the expression and considered as the co-occurrence of tenor and vehicle or a vehicle as implicative tenor according to the structure.Second, proverbs are a product of human cognition, most of them are metaphorical. The dissertation makes a preliminary analysis of the proverb creation and comprehension by applying the theory of cognitive linguistics and especially metaphor. Such a fact is showed that proverbs as a truth value are based on human experience; proverb creation is the result of interaction between the objective world and human metaphorical thinking; proverb comprehension is a mapping of one conceptual domainonto another. Proverbs, as a conventional mapping, usually surpass the contexts used by metaphors originally, and can be used on more general and broader ones, thus obtaining for the proverbs a universal meaning in sum. Starting from this viewpoint, we can get an overall comprehension of the proverbs and of the dynamic conceptual blending in the process and accordingly an insight into the nature of human thinking.Finally, proverb creation and comprehension are deeply rooted in the national culture. Proverbs convey their lessons by combining the special cases in social lives with more ordinary, common and specific ideas in lives. Proverbs have some common characteristics that go beyond the differences between various cultures, and the most important one is its implication based on the figurative rather than literal meaning. The using of proverbs reflects the role that conceptual metaphors play in people's knowledge of the world. Metaphors occur in the process of metaphorical thinking, revealing how people know the world. The particular cultural background is one of the key factors that determine the generating, using and comprehending of the proverbs. Different nations have their particular cultures deeply rooted in the people's notions and reflected in their languages. And proverbs, from one aspect, reflect the application and interpretation of the national cultureIn a word, the dissertation underlies the contrastive analysis of the English and Chinese proverbs to explore the differences in the Chineseand English way of thinking by contrasting the structures, meanings and cultural characteristics of the proverbs. Meanwhile, starting from cognitive linguistics it looks further into their theoretical bases, the mechanism and cognitive patterns and further confirms that experience and conception play an important role in the construction of the language structure and function.