| Idioms, the essence of language, are the accumulation and distillation of all kinds of experience of people in the course of daily life. Animals are our friends and have a close relationship with human beings. For this reason, people would like to express their feelings by using animals’images. There are plentiful idioms about animals in both English and Chinese. Because of the different cultural backgrounds, the meanings of animal idioms in different langauges differ widely and make learners difficult in understanding. Sheep are a kind of common and useful animal in almost every nation. As an essential animal, sheep are often used to describe certain things or express some feelings by human beings.The writer of this paper is to make a comparative study about sheep idioms between English and Chinese. This dissertation finds that most sheep idioms as a linguistic phenomenon are metaphorical phrases and have their own national character. The synchronic and diachronic approaches to idioms shows that these idioms may have phonetic motivation, morphological motivation, semantic motivation and etymological motivation. The elaboration of such idioms from linguistic, cultural and rhetorical perspectives reveals that sheep idioms are rich in symbolic meanings, closely related with religion, superstition and custom, and have cognitive characteristics of simile, metaphor and analogy. The paper comes to a conclusion that sheep idioms are created by human beings’ to represent different things and persons in society, and they contain rich and colourful cultural connotations and symbolic meanings. A good command of sheep idioms can not only help us understand the target language better and make the intercultural communication smooth and efficient, but also help us comprehend similar and different ways of thinking between British and Chinese people. The author believes that this study is both practical and valuable for Chinese learners of English. |
