A Metaphorical Approach To Chinese And English Educational Proverbs

The study of metaphor remains to be a concern for linguists. There are two main schools of ideas: traditional view and cognitive view. As to the traditional view of metaphor, it is restricted to a kind of rhetoric method. Its existence is universal. Comparatively, for cognitive view of metaphor, metaphor is cognitive and indispensable. Metaphors also exhibit cultural influences in people’s cognition. Simultaneously, proverb is a kind of vividly described sentence which is widely spread among folks. It is concise in form but rich in the expressions of wisdom, knowledge, and daily embodied experience. In this sense, metaphor bridges proverbs and the involved cognitive process. Education, as a field of concern makes study of educational proverbs practical in illustrating similarities, differences, and related reasons.Objectives of this study contain three points. Firstly, this research is conducted to provide more supporting evidence for universality of conceptual metaphor in both Chinese and English educational proverbs. Secondly, this research is conducted to spot similarities and differences of educational proverbs in Chinese and English. Thirdly, this research is an attempt to find explanations for these similarities and differences, namely, how cultural values account for these similarities and differences.This study is carried out within the theoretical framework of the conceptual metaphor. As this study is a comparative work between Chinese and English educational proverbs, Chinese Proverbs Dictionary and English Proverbs Dictionary are corpuses in this thesis. It is developed under the 3 sub-categories –the structural metaphor, the orientational metaphor and the ontological metaphor. Examples concerning Chinese and English educational proverbs are listed and analyzed on this basis. In structural metaphor, EDUCATION IS A JOURNEY is used for analysis by taking students, teachers, etc into consideration. In ontological metaphor, knowledge, diligence, and practice,etc are used as target domains. In orientational metaphor, relationship between more/less and up/down are discussed from two perspectives. One is in proportional relation and another is inverse proportional relation.On the basis of description and comparison, similarities and differences are listed as follows. In respect to similarities, mappings in related structural, ontological, and orientational metaphors correspond to each other. The other is significance contained in educational proverbs under each sub-category is similar. As to similarities, explanations are universality in conceptual metaphor, mappings from source to target domain, and popularity of education. Apart from similarities, differences do exist. They are displayed via dictions in examples. Considering this, explanations are concluded into listed 4 aspects. Firstly, they differ in religious beliefs. In Chinese proverbs, it displays influence of Buddhism. In English, it exhibits influence of Christianity. Secondly, agriculture-oriented China emphasizes aspects related to agriculture and nature. In China, because of climate, geography, and historical factors, agriculture is influential. Thirdly, Chinese educational proverbs exhibit influence of Confucianism. Last but not least, both Chinese and English examples exhibit influence of related literature aspects.This study has three findings. Firstly, it provides more supporting evidence for the universality of conceptual metaphor. Secondly, the thesis finds out similarities and differences f in these two languages. Thirdly, comparative analysis of proverbs from also provides supporting evidence for the uniqueness of metaphor in 2 cultures.