Animal Metaphors In Idioms

Lakoff and Johnson (1980), in their work Metaphors We Live By, claim that the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured. Metaphor is no longer a way of expression, but a way of conceptualization. In recent years, cognitive linguists at home and abroad have summarized conceptual metaphors through linguistic units with a view to discovering the characteristics of the human ways of thinking. Inspired by them, the present author carried out a contrastive study of English and Chinese idioms.Idioms can be said to be the core of a language. Its formation was closely linked to the nation's historical background, economy, geography, customs, and psychological state. An idiom is a condensation of rich cultural connotations. Psychologists once confirmed that idioms (or at least, the majority of them) are conceptual and not linguistic in nature. Almost every idiom can be analyzed through metaphor, metonymy and conventional knowledge. Thus, study of idioms in the perspective of cognitive linguistics to discover the characteristics of thinking system is feasible and effective. However, idioms, as a cultural mirror, are all-inclusive. Therefore, the author chooses to focus only on the animal idioms because animals are one of the important source domains people use to establish conceptual metaphors as has been mentioned in K?vecses'book Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (2002). In their long-term contacts with animals, people gradually captured the animals'appearance, habits and other characteristics. When such animal features are mapped onto certain related characters of human beings or a variety of things and phenomena, animal metaphors are formed. Animal idioms in English and Chinese are too numerous to mention. For instance, in English, there are"be like a dog with two tails","a red rag to a bull","sort out/ separate the sheep from the goats". In Chinese, you can find animal idioms like"lang zi shou xin (狼子兽心;cruel people)","niu gao ma da (牛高马大;people that are tall and strong)","shu mu cun guang (鼠目寸光;one cannot see beyond one's nose)"etc. Additionally, researches on animal idioms at home and abroad have been conducted from many aspects. However, few are made in the perspective of cognitive linguistics, let alone systematic ones. Thus, a detailed analysis of all the metaphorical use of animal idioms based on systematic collection of corpora in English and Chinese will be carried out from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. More specifically, the scope of mappings, the differentiation of positively valued or negatively valued meaning extensions, the characteristics of the target domains and so on and so forth are investigated.The author chooses one idiom dictionary in English and in Chinese respectively and establishes a closed corpus of animal idioms. Alice Deignan (2001) summarized the most frequently used animal names and classified them into two types: the general terms and the particular kind of animals. She further classifies the second type into three specific types: the domestic animals, the farm animals and the wild animals. Taking his summary as the reference, the author collects 49 animal idioms including 14 kinds of animals in English and 215 animal idioms including 15 kinds of animals in Chinese. 12 pairs of corresponding animals in the two languages are finally established for comparison. Based on the analysis of the data, conclusions are made as follows. Firstly, most animals are used to construct the HUAMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS metaphor which takes up 94.78%. Other metaphors are also found. They are UNPLEASANT SITUATIONS ARE ANIMALS, OBJECTS OF POOR QUALITY ARE ANIMALS and PRECIOUS OBJECTS ARE ANIMALS. Secondly, a larger number of animal idioms are negatively valued which take up 67.5% and 62.5% in English and Chinese respectively. Thirdly, meaning extensions of each animal in English differ considerably with the ones in Chinese. Only 6 kinds of animals coincide in 7 meaning extensions which take up only 10.37%. Although the same animal image in the two languages does not often extend meanings in the same way, English and Chinese people sometimes use different animal images to express the same meaning. 11 meaning extensions fall into this case. Additionally, some meaning extensions are shared by different animal images within a language, i.e. images of"pig"and"horse"are used to imply"people who eat a lot"in English; images of"horse"and"bear"are used to mean"strong"in Chinese. Fourthly, one of the obvious features of Chinese animal idioms differs from that of English is that 63.43% of Chinese idioms are coined with 2 vehicles whereas only 5.77% of English idioms encode two vehicles. Fifthly, animal names are all used in their noun forms when expressing metaphorical senses, which is not in conformity with Deignan's (2005) claim that the noun form in the source domain of animals often appears as adjectives or verbs when used in their metaphorical senses, i.e."bullish"in"the market is bullish"and"mouse"in"a short, mousy woman".In short, the established closed corpus can provide an objective and systematic reflection of the use of idioms and better reveal the similarities and differences of the thinking system between English and Chinese. In addition, the study also has important implications for idioms teaching and learning, and idiom translation of English to Chinese and Chinese to English. Admittedly, due to the limitations of the author's knowledge and space constraint of the thesis, the study still has much room for improvement. However, the author's exploration provides some referential facts for the study of metaphors. We have found that many new issues are worth exploring in this field. How to make our studies of animal metaphors in idioms more systematic and more in depth still requires our great efforts.