A Cognitive Approach To Animal Metaphors

Animals, as humans' best friends, have been arresting the attention of linguists,biologists and sociologists. Nowadays many papers on animal metaphors are limitedto a brief list of some simple cultural phenomena from a cultural perspective. Thethesis attempts to conduct a cross-linguistic research into the conceptualization ofanimal metaphors and to explore how animals as source domains are mapped ontoother target domains and accounts for the possible reasons for their differences andsimilarities in Chinese and English from cognitive and cultural perspectives. Thethesis puts an emphasis on the conceptual metaphor HUMANS ARE ANIMALS insome detail, as well as the mappings from animal onto other domains, which are thecore of my thesis. By making a comparison of animal metaphors in English andChinese the conclusion is drawn as follows: the similarities and differences of animalmetaphors in Chinese and English are mainly brought about by cultural variations andthe same cognitive basis of human beings.