A Cognitive Study Of Proverb Understanding In English Language

This thesis aims to explore how the cognitive mechanism helps to work in people's understanding of proverbs, especially, in a multiple-cultural situation. This thesis, challenging the traditional view, in accord with Lakoff's (1989) also argues that a cognitive approach to proverbs is a more direct and automatic understanding of their metaphorical value. Three research questions are designed to testify and reason for this thesis. 1. Is proverb understanding an automatic or a problem-solving process? In what ways does conceptual mapping work in it? 2. How does the cognitive process work for metaphorical and metonymic proverbs? Does it vary from one to another? 3. How does the cognitive perspective help to understand the universality and specificity of proverbs?This study,as a combination, is theoretically informed and empirically grounded. Data collected for this study comes from google.com,'A Collection of English Proverbs'and'Chinese-English Proverbs and Culture'. They were coded in categories, namely open coding and axial coding. The coded samples are analyzed in both qualitative and quantitative methods under the following operating theory frameworks: 1. Lakoff's (1987) Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM), and Gibbs'(1997) Conceptual Metaphor Hypothesis, and 2. Lakoff and Turner's (1989) Great Chain Metaphor Theory (GCMT) as a cultural model.The research findings are: Proverb understanding is an automatic process; The cognitive process varies in certain aspect from metaphor to metonymy; Cognitive power is the key to understanding proverbs across cultures; Proverbs are contextually right rather than absolutely because people's use of proverbs vary in different contexts.This thesis ends with the implications and recommendations for further research, and the limitations in this study.