A Cognitive Study Of "Wolf" Metaphors In The Novel Langtuteng

Many researches on animal metaphors are made from the cultural perspective, thetranslation perspective, the literal perspective and the cognitive perspective. Afteranalyzing previous studies on animal metaphors, the author finds that study on animalmetaphors in novels from the perspective of cognitive linguistics has become one of thehot issues. Langtuteng, one of the outstanding Chinese novels, tells about life of wolves inInner Mongolia. Wolf metaphors are commonly used when the writer Jiang Rong describescharacteristics and behaviors of wolves. After poring over Langtuteng, the author of thisthesis attempts to explore wolf metaphors in it, within the theoretical framework ofConceptual Metaphor Theory in the range of cognitive linguistics.By using Conceptual Metaphor Theory, proposed by Lakoff and Johnson in1980, and“HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS” metaphor, this paper is trying to solve the followingthree research questions:1. What are the types of wolf metaphors in Chinese novel Langtuteng from thecognitive perspective? What wolf images do these wolf metaphors present?2. What are the motivations of these types of wolf metaphors?The findings of this study are as follows: Firstly, by classifying and analyzing datacollected from the novel Langtuteng, this paper divides all the wolf metaphors in this novelinto four types, namely, the mapping based on appearances, the mapping based onbehaviors and actions, the mapping based on emotions and characters and the mappingbased on names. The four categories above belong to “WOLVES ARE HUMAN BEINGS”metaphor and “WOLVES AER OTHER OBJECTS” metaphor. This paper finds thatmappings from source domains “HUMANS” and “OTHER OBJECTS” to the targetdomain “WOLVES” are possible because of the existence of similarities between the twodomains. Besides, one part of the features of source domains is highlighted in each distinctwolf metaphor. New images of wolf are presented which are different from those ofprevious opinions. Secondly, the formation of wolf metaphors in this novel has its owndistinct cognitive and contextual factors. Wolf metaphors are cognitively motivated. Fromthe perspective of people’s cognition, this thesis finds that such kind of cognition areinfluenced by living environments, educational backgrounds, people’s own beliefs andtraditions and customs from their own race. Besides, effects of the cultural context, thesituational context and the linguistic context play important roles in formations of wolfmetaphors. This paper enriches the study of animal metaphors, especially animal metaphors in novels, and it hopes to make a better understanding about animal novels.