A Cognitive Linguistic Study Of Chinese And Western Leaving-Home Fairy Tales

As an important genre of children literature, fairy tale takes its origin from ancient myths and legends, and is passed down generation by generation. Folk fairy tale is the reflection of ancient people's perception, imagination and understanding of the world around them. Fairy tale plays the role as a carrier of a nation's history, experience, culture, religion, ideology, and values. The fairy tales composed by modern writers are also penetrated with the spirit of the society and the times. The genre is not only a thinking model, but also a way to connect us with the world.As the reflection of people's conceptualization of the world when the humans were in their childhood, fairy tale is an important way for children, who have limited knowledge and experience, to learn about the world.In the thesis, the author chooses 20 Chinese fairy tales and 20 western ones with the plot of"leaving home"as the key corpus, and analyzes them with the cognitive linguistic categories like schema, metaphor and conceptual integration."Leaving home"is a metaphor for the growth of the protagonist. The rivers, mountains, monsters, deceitful animals, witches, etc. are the difficulties in the process of growth. Some tales can be explained in terms of the conceptual integration of the"leaving home"plot and a prototype. For example, the tale Catskin can be also considered to be an extension of the Cinderella prototype.And from the comparison between the Chinese tales and western ones, the author has found that there are differences between the Chinese tales and the western ones in such aspects as reasons of leaving home, the ways of overcoming the difficulties and the endings. From the first two aspects, the author draws a conclusion that the awareness of"independence"in Chinese fairy tales is not as much as in western fairy tales. And the ways of ending show the different moral requirements of children.