A Cultural Contrastive Study Of Metaphor Cognition On Plant Terms Between Chinese And English

From the traditional linguistics view, Metaphor is considered as a rhetorical way. Lakoff and Johnson’s "conceptual metaphor theory" made metaphor get rid of the shackle of the traditional theory that metaphor is no longer a simple language phenomenon, but a cognitive phenomenon until the1980s. In fact, the way of thinking of human beings is metaphorical, and plays a significant role in the process of our understanding of the world, creating new meanings and accepting new knowledge.Plant metaphor is one of the most important ways in understanding and comprehending the world of human beings. Plant metaphor is ubiquitous in any language. Plant is closely linked with people’s life and plays an important part in the long history of human development. There exists abundant plant vocabulary in English and Chinese and they have similarities and differences in metaphorical meaning. We can get the cultural meaning from different levels reflect by those plant metaphors. Based on that, this paper slightly discussed the cognitive mode of plant metaphors in English and Chinese and analyzed the common plant words of the two languages in different cultural context. Metaphor and culture are inseparable. Different culture has different cultural meaning in plant metaphor which means that we should understand and master metaphor in a specific cultural environment, therefore, we need to understand metaphor in cultural diversity. Meanwhile, this paper highlighted the reason that differences and similarities of plant metaphor in English and Chinese from the cultural perspective and pointed out that difference lies in the cultural background, such as philosophy, religion, way of thinking, geography, social custom and so on.In addition, this paper pointed out that metaphor’s importance in vocabulary teaching and cultural teaching of foreign language teaching and how to utilize metaphor in teaching effectively by analyzing the diversity of metaphorical expression. At the same time, it is conducive to cross-cultural communication and understanding the cultural meaning of words accurately in the context of analysis of English and Chinese metaphors.