Chinese Zodiac: A Contrastive Study Of Animal Metaphors Between English And Chinese

Studies on animal metaphors, which are an essential field to metaphor study, are relatively few. The study attempts to address metaphorical expressions of twelve animals describing people from Chinese and English which represent different linguistic and cultural background, in order to examine how the everyday metaphors in two languages work, to what extent the metaphorical mappings are similar, and to what extent they differ. Based on conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), including the Great Chain of Being theory (Lakoff & Turner, 1989) and principle of metaphorical highlighting (K?vecses, 2002), we find that animals as source domain can be conceptualized onto the target domain of human. This mapping or projection can be elaborated because only the highlighted attribute in animal domain could be projected onto the human domain, while others are hidden.Through the comparative study of animal metaphors between Chinese and English, the result indicates that universality and variation are indeed found in two languages. When the animal-based metaphorical expressions are used to denote people, they convey derogatory meanings in general. When the animal-based expressions are applied to human beings, the mechanism operated behind them is two-directional: human beings are animals and animals are human beings. Animal metaphors denoting human beings in two languages differ in aspects such as degree of negativeness, degree of highlighting, and notions of source domain. Firstly, animal metaphors in Chinese are consistently associated with other animals when demonstrating the negativeness, while in English, they are scarcely found to have such characteristic. Secondly, animal metaphors describing people in Chinese tend to highlight the characteristics of the animal itself, while animal metaphors in English highlight additional meanings out of animal itself. Thirdly, due to different notions of source domain of animals, varied construal of a source domain from the two cultures cause variations in conceptualization of the target domain.Although this research is not thorough enough to cover all animals, 307 animal metaphors of Chinese Zodiac-based selected are representative and convincing, and it is instructive both theoretically and practically. It enriches the cognitive theory on animal metaphors by revealing their generation and exploring the internal mechanism. More importantly, it discovers universalities and variations of metaphors related to twelve animals in two languages, which will help the development of foreign teaching and cultural exchange.