On Comprehension Of Animal Metaphors In Chinese And English From Cognitive And Cultural Perspectives

A large number of animal metaphors exist in both Chinese and English, but objective cultural backgrounds and subjective factors also bring some difficulties in comprehension. Nowadays many papers on animal metaphors are limited to a brief list of some simple cultural phenomena from a cultural perspective or to a list of animals as source domains are mapped onto other target domains from a cognitive perspective. The former studies haven't systematically explored the process of understanding animal metaphors. Only through this way can we find some possible factors which cause some difficulties in the process of understanding animal metaphors, and then people can take measures to avoid difficulties and improve the comprehension of animal metaphors.This thesis tries to explore the process of understanding animal metaphors under the metaphor theory proposed by Shu Dingfang in Studies in Metaphor. There are two steps in understanding metaphor: recognition of metaphor and inference of the metaphorical meaning with the help of theory and context. This thesis first puts an emphasis on the universality and cultural variation of animal metaphors; second, explores the process of understanding some typical animal metaphors; last, concludes some factors which leads to some difficulties in understanding and proposes some effective ways to improve the comprehension of animal metaphors.By exploring the process of understanding animal metaphors in Chinese and English, we find that the conceptual metaphor theory and context is far from enough to understand animal metaphors, and there are many subjective factors which influence the understanding. These factors include people's interests in animals and people's ability of association and so on. In view of above factors, the author thinks that people should take in as more as effective theories and cultural backgrounds; meantime, people should expand their own interests in animals and develop the ability of discussing and associating as much information as possible about animals in different cultures.To a certain degree, this study is meaningful though there are some limitations in studying the process of understanding animal metaphors. According to the exploration of understanding animal metaphors, this thesis points out a new direction for the people, who consistently use theories and limited cultural backgrounds to understand metaphor. That is to say, based on these theories and cultural backgrounds, people should improve the understanding of animal metaphors from one's own subjective factors.