The Verbal Humor In American Talk Shows

Metaphor is a universal phenomenon in human's cognition and linguistic realization. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) first proposed in their seminal book Metaphors We Live By the metaphor definition of using words or experiences of one domain to express matters or experiences of another. Lakoff & Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory has opened a new era for metaphor study. Ever since Conceptual Metaphor Theory, metaphor has been seen as pervasive in human's thought, action and language, and an important cognitive instrument, by which human beings perceive, categorize and conceptualize the world.Animals have been attracting the attention of linguists, biologists and sociologists owing to the close relationship with human beings'life. Animals play an important role in human beings'life. So do animal terms in language. Animals, with their rich categorical attributes and delicate relationship with human beings, are widely and constantly used as a source domain in metaphors. Animal words are chosen as the object and a viewpoint that there exists a conceptual metaphor HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS is held in this thesis. Lakoff & Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory is applied to study animal words and their.meaning. 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. The animal attributes including physical appearance, actions, characteristics, group of animals are mapped onto those of human beings. Animal metaphor is rife in people's thought and language and become conventional.Cultural has a great effect on the metaphor understanding. This thesis is intended to explore cultural universalities and variations of animal metaphors between Chinese and English by making a contrastive study of animal metaphors from a cognitive and cultural perspective. When animal metaphors in two languages formed on the different cultural backgrounds, it is very difficult for the people in different cultures to understand the animal metaphors. The different part is the difficult point for every language learner. The difference in cultural meaning of animal words in different languages results from the influence of physical environments, social and culture backgrounds and thinking patterns. The thesis not only provides some factors which influence the understanding of animal metaphors but also the way to understand metaphor. The study of animal words from the angle of cognition may help to deepen the research in language and at the same time offer some guidance to language teaching and learning.