Study On The Relations Between Metaphor Understanding And Parallelism In English Proverbs

As the essence of culture, proverbs are the wisdom of people and concentration of their experiences. Proverbs are also sought after by researchers and scholars both at home and abroad as a kind of language phenomenon through studying the figures of speech, syntactic features, cultural background and so on. And metaphor as an important and active part of rhetoric in proverbs is worth studying as a single field. Looking back the previous studies on metaphor, it is widely accepted that studying metaphor should be started with the perspective of vocabulary, rhetoric, translating and so on. It is seldom touched to study metaphor in an independent language carrier. Besides, proverbs can be an appropriate research object to talk about and analyze metaphor deeply. Proverbs are famous for the special structures to follow the features of neatness and antithesis, which makes parallelism be a relatively popular form to present a proverb. Parallelism is a combination of more than two parts which are parallel to each other, in other words, they have the same or similar structures and the relevant contents. Parallel structures are active in some special styles for the syntactic features. Taking all above into consideration, a new theme can be set as finding out the relations between metaphor understanding and parallelism in English proverbs.The relevant theories on metaphor provide more guidance to the theoretical foundations of this thesis. In this thesis, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory in 1980 is adopted as the theoretical foundation which thinks that the essence of metaphor lies in mind, which brings research on metaphor to the cognitive level and makes this field step into a new stage. Based on this theory, metaphor works as a common and persuasive phenomenon generating metaphorical meaning. The working mechanism of metaphor is mapping which means the transformation from the source domain to the target domain. In addition, to reflect the transformation from English to Chinese better, especially when proverbs with strong cultural background are used as research objects, the classification of metaphor in this thesis is based on Chinese scholar Shu Dingfang’ s opinions, which are noun metaphor, verbal metaphor, prepositional metaphor, adjective metaphor and sentence metaphor which is added up by the author.In this thesis, the questionnaire testing and comparative analysis is adopted as research methodology. And the respondents are narrowed to the students of Grade One and Grade Three in English major in the Northeast Agricultural University. The researches have been organized for two times to make the results more reliable. For the first time, the questionnaire design aims at finding out the relations between metaphor understanding in English proverbs and the comparison between English and Chinese syntactic. However, the results do not show the universality but leads to another important finding, which show the diversity of metaphor understanding and translating in parallel-form proverbs. After the two researches mentioned above, this topic of the research has been made now. Based on the results of the first research, the questionnaires are modified and the second research has been done. For this time, the results reflect the main body clearly. This thesis aims at solving the following problems:Are there some relations between metaphor understanding and parallelism in English proverbs;Do the respondents lay more emphasis on correct understanding or accordance with form;The sequence of five types of metaphor understanding from top to bottom;The impact of mother tongue knowledge on metaphor understanding.After the data collection and results analysis, the conclusions of this research are as follows:There are relations between metaphor understanding and parallelism in English proverbs. To some extent, parallel structures help and promote understand metaphor understanding. And the impact varies with different types of metaphor;Most respondents regardless of professional level tend to follow the parallel structures;The metaphor understandings from top to bottom are noun metaphor, verbal metaphor, prepositional metaphor together with sentence metaphor and adjective metaphor respectively;Most respondents turn to their mother tongue unconsciously, which brings about the concept of “compromised expression”;The higher professional the respondents are, the better metaphor understanding in parallel-form proverbs.According to the research results, the relevant suggestions for better metaphor understanding in proverbs of parallelism are proposed such as deeper exploration of etymology, broader cultural context as well as more focus on syntactic structure, especially the parallelism. And limitations and corresponding advice for future study are put into discussion.