| For the Chinese people, hu is the king of the animals. And for the English-speaking people, the animal, lion, is the king in the animal world. This cultural phenomenon reflects in their respective languages with a lot of "hu" idioms and "lion" idioms. Most of Chinese "hu" idioms and English "lion" idioms are equivalent in meaning.The analysis in this paper adopts a comparatively new visual angle, that is, the cognitive-comparative approach to study the meaning extensions of Chinese "hu" idioms and English "lion" idioms. And finally the speaker tries to discover the rooted causes of such similarities and differences between them.The similarities between Chinese "hu" idioms and English "lion" idioms come from people's common cognition towards hu and lions in different cultures. The root causes of such similarities lie on the conceptual integration of Chinese hu and British lion. The differences between them are from different cultural models. Therefore, this paper tries to analyze the similarities between them with the cognitive principle of the metonymical mapping between category and its features together with the principle of frame and profile and to explain their differences with the principle of cognitive model and cultural model.
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