Metaphorical Cognition Of Chinese "Snake" And English "snake"

The usage of metaphor can be found everywhere in both Chinese and English. In Chinese language,"BI and XING" have been widely used in the Book of Songs; and in English language, among poems and everyday speech, metaphor is also common. The study of metaphor started from Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric. In1980s, as Metaphor We Live By written by Lakoff&Johnson published, the study of metaphor became hottest topic in recent decades; Domestic study of metaphor also got rid of the limitation of rhetoric research since1990s, and launched a multi-dimensional study.This article starts with Chinese "Snake" and English"Snake", and then makes a little microscopic investigation between metaphor in Chinese and English by comparing the cognition of metaphor in both languages. This article is divided into four sections. The Introduction section mainly summarizes the history and contemporary situation of metaphor study, briefly introduces the theoretical knowledge of metaphor and the metaphor research status of Chinese "Snake" and English "Snake" in the views of current cross-cultural comparative study and cognitive linguistics; Chapter1and2are the body of the article, firstly identify that according to the classification method of target domain by Lakoff&Johnson, the metaphor of Chinese "Snake" and English "Snake" belongs to ontological metaphor, secondly, based on the corpus, in accordance with the scope of the target domain, we get the common metaphor of Chinese "Snake" and English"Snake"(snake is a deceitful or treacherous person, snake is something resembling a snake, snake is long, the sound of snake is dangerous, the move of snake is the move of other things, snake is sex (procreation, propagation), snake is treacherous and vicious, snake is mysterious, snake is greedy, snake is medicine, snake is dangerous situation, snake is feeling, snake is thought), the characteristic metaphor of Chinese "Snake"(snake is sexy woman (charming but harmful), snake is bent men, snake is fine calligraphy works. snake is persistent, snake is lucky, snake is laziness, snake is wealth, snake is inferior, snake is god. godhood (Ancestors, monarch), snake is power), and the characteristic metaphor of English"Snake"(snake is wisdom, snake’s belly is low, snake is cold and indifferent, snake is infinite, snake is long life and new-born) and sum up their cognitive paths; Chapter4analyzes the character of the similarities, that is similarity, experience and system and specifically analyzes the differences of cultural causes from the4aspects:difference of geographical environment, difference of religious faith, difference of historical development and difference of thoughts pattern.