A Contrastive Analysis Of Semantic Derogation In English And Chinese Animal Metaphor: A Cognitive Approach

Semantic derogation, which is one research area within the studies of sexism of language,has the connotation of linguistic discrimination towards human beings. Although it can applyto both sexes, in practice it refers to the negative connotations and negative stereotypesconveyed by words or statements referring to women.There are many aspects of language that can reflect the existence of semantic derogation,among which Animal Metaphor is a particular kind. The mechanism as well as the cognitivemodel of Animal Metaphor is based on the Great Chain Metaphor proposed by Lakoff andTurner (1989), by which we may understand human beings (higher-order form of beings) interms of animals (lower-order form of beings), or understand animals in terms of humanbeings. Thus Animal Metaphor, based on the GENERIC IS SPECIFIC metaphor, allows themapping of generic information from the source domain to a specific instantiation in thetarget domain.This paper makes a contrastive as well as a cognitive analysis of two paired animal termsfox/vixen-hú/húlijīng (狐/狐狸精) and dog/bitch-gǒu/mǔgǒu (狗/母狗). The instrumentadopted in the analysis for gathering data is nineteen dictionaries of both English and Chinese,which have a great coverage of usage and meanings. And by analyzing the metaphoricalmeanings elicited in the dictionaries, similarities and differences of the animal metaphors arefound. By making a cognitive analysis of the paired animal terms, with ANIMALS AREPEOPLE and PEOPLE ARE ANIMALS metaphors in the cognition process, a detaileddescription and analysis of the exampled paired animals is given for the working mechanismof the animal metaphors, and semantic derogation is found here.Four aspects of the metaphorical usage of the animal terms are to be investigated. Firstly,it is to find whether these examples of Animal Metaphor are equally conceptualized inEnglish and Chinese. Secondly, it is to discover whether the two paired examples within eachlanguage are used in semantic derogation. Thirdly, if there is semantic derogation, it is aimedto find out whether it applies equally to male and female terms. Finally, the results arecompared to see if the same degree and kind of semantic derogation is observed in the animalmetaphors of two languages or not.Based on the analysis of the Animal Metaphors in English and Chinese, it is concludedthat first, the animal pairs analyzed here are metaphorically applied to people of both Englishand Chinese although there are some differences in the two languages; second, the animalterms used are indeed used with some kind of semantic derogation; third, the terms referringto females have more worse connotations than those used to refer to males; fourth, there are...