A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Proverbs Containing Animal And Plant Words

This thesis attempts to make a comparative study of English and Chinese proverbs containing animal and plant words. In order to proceed with this study, four newly-published proverb dictionaries are sifted to collect data. In the research, it is discovered that Chinese proverbs enjoy more possibilities in using animal or plant words and that animal words have more chances to be used than plant words in both English and Chinese proverbs.On the semantic level, the most striking characteristic of these proverbs is their two semantic dualities. This kind of proverbs' metaphorical meanings often shift to literal meanings due to frequent use, but the author notices that in certain contexts the original literal meanings may revive and the metaphorical meanings may disappear. It is human's common cognitive-semantic mechanism that results in the above phenomena, to be exact, metaphorical mechanism. It is also noticed that Chinese and English people can employ different animal and plant metaphors to express the same idea. Moreover, in an appropriate context, an animal proverb or a plant proverb may have more than one metaphorical meaning. The author thinks that the radical reason for these is that people can discover or create different similarities and in many cases the similarities are psychological.On the phase of rhetoric, it is discovered that Chinese proverbs have the advantage of words. More synonyms and antonyms are used in Chinese proverbs than English proverbs. In Chinese proverbs, the concurrence of animal or plant words and numerals, whose meanings can also be diversified, is much higher than in English proverbs. The former is the result of the inherent advantage of Chinese monosyllables. Even if they are disyllables or multi-syllabic words, the formation of them is mostly the result of the pile-up of monosyllables. The latter is because Chinese is an image language and English is a logic language. English proverbs are superior to Chinese proverbs in flexibility of sentence structure and rhyme. Since proverbs containing animal and plant words themselves are often metaphors, an image trope, they can...