A Contrastive Study Of Chinese, English And Japanese Animal Metaphor: A Cognitive And Cultural Perspective

As we all know, metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, butalso in thought and action. Human and animals live together. Animals are the survivepartner closely related to human. During the living time, people have saved a lot ofanimals’ characteristics knowledge in their long term memory. With the gradualunderstanding towards to animals’ image, physiology, habits and actions, people findsome similarities between animals and human beings’ social activities. Aftersummarizing these similarities on a language level, animal metaphor is produced. Inevery language, there are many animal metaphor words, it’s very necessary for us topay attention to animal metaphor. So in this paper we will try to discuss Chinese,English and Japanese animal metaphor word from a cognitive and culturalperspective.Animal metaphor is the interaction between two concepts, which must base onthe similarities between source domains and targets domains. When some features ofsource domain map to target domain, there produces metaphorical meanings. Basedon the data we have collected, we try to analyze syntactic features and semanticchanges in Chinese, English and Japanese animal metaphor. Due to the function ofmetaphor, the semantic of animal terms will change. So, this paper will mainlyanalyzes in which ways the semantic of Chinese, English and Japanese animal wordschange. Through this way, we can find the universals and variations of semanticchanges in Chinese, English and Japanese animal words.At present, many scholars have taken the research to the meanings of animalwords. Some of them adopted conceptual metaphor theory to study this phenomenon,and we will adopt image schema theory to discuss this problem. The schema theoryplays a very important role in the metaphor construction. It is also the cognitive andpsychological basis to understand the thought of animal metaphor. This thesis we will take "gou","dog", and "quan" as examples. The aim of comparison is attempt to findout the cognitive mechanisms of animal words’ meanings, thus we can recognizeanimal metaphors from a new cognitive view. Meanwhile, the thesis also tries todeeply explain the different metaphorical meanings of animal words form culturalperspective in Chinese, English and Japanese. By Multi-angle analyzing Chinese,English and Japanese animal metaphor, we aim to enrich the research of animalmetaphor.