Animal Metaphors Denoting Human Beings: A Contrastive Analysis Between Chinese And English

This thesis is intended to explore cultural universalities and variations of animal metaphors denoting human beings between Chinese and English by doing a contrastive study from a cognitive perspective. The complete research is based on the conceptual metaphor theory proposed by George Lakoff.Animal terms are ubiquitous in all languages and influence our way of speaking and thinking. People use animal metaphors so unconsciously in daily communications that they all take them for granted. Actually they're linguistic realizations of the metaphorical concept of "Human beings are animals".First of all the working mechanism of this conceptual metaphor is analyzed to indicate how the proportional structure in source domain of ANIMAL can be projected onto the correspondent parts in the target domain of HUMAN. We find that this projection or mapping can be interpreted because only part of animal features in source domain is highlighted in each specific metaphor. Furthermore the interpretation is culturally embedded.Then specific metaphors related to four culturally-loaded and representative animals, namely mouse/rat, ass/donkey, bull/ox/cow/calf and sheep/goat/lamb are collected and compared. Data are classified in accordance with the highlighted parts in source domain. Results show that culture influences metaphor understanding by influencing the construals of the source domain. When a source domain is construed in the same way in two language environments, the metaphor meaning is universal. On the contrary, different construals of the same source domain may lead to < variations of metaphor understanding. None of these four animal metaphors are totally different in two cultures, since these animals share the samite biological features. Nevertheless, metaphors of each animal bear more variations than universalities, because these four animals are culturally-loaded.Although this research is not thorough enough to cover all animals, it is instructive both theoretically and practically. It enriches the cognitive theory on animal metaphors by revealing their generation and interpretation mechanism. More importantly, it discovers universalities and variations of metaphors related to four common animals in two languages, which will help us to overcome the barriers in cross-cultural communication.