A Metaphorical And Metonymic Study Of Chinese And English Animal Idioms

Idioms which can reflect the historical and cultural tradition of different nationalities to the large extent are the precipitation of human language. The study of English and Chinese idioms about animals from the perspective of metaphor and metonymy has the important significance of cross-culture communication and ethnology. Metaphor and metonymy become one of the most important issues which has been paid close attention to by many disciplines, such as, philosophy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychology, sociology, pedagogy, and so on. The cognitive competence of human has an impact on the using and creating of metaphor and metonymy. On the contrary, up to a point, the using and creation of metaphor and metonymy will influence the cognitive habits and the way of cognition. Metaphor is one of the important means of knowing, describing and even changing the world.Human’s outside experience and perception and cognition of the objective world can get a lot from the cognition of animals. We are familiar with the zodiac animals which have a far-reaching influence. The zodiac signals which are made up of twelve kinds of animals is a kind of symbolic system of Chinese culture. Themed with the zodiac animals, books, films, television programs and amusement parks largely enrich our spiritual life. Close as the people and animals are, we often relate some features and emotions to these animals during our daily life. We use their habits and characteristics to convey abstract cultural connotation. English and Chinese, both of them have long history. They all endow zodiac animal correspondent associative meaning. English and Chinese people have lived in similar physical environment, joining similar activities. In enviably, their culture will have some general character. But differences in social custom, cultural tradition, values, thinking modes, will lead their culture different. Culture universality and difference reflect on the zodiac animal words.Metonymy and metaphor are the most basic elements of cognitive linguistics. To study the zodiac animal idioms which we are closely link with from the perspective of metaphor and metonymy is the enrichment of cognitive linguistics and embodied philosophy.This paper approaches to dictionary combines corpus,combining qualitative research and quantitative research,choosing the Chinese zodiac animal idioms as the object of study.Find out the correlative idioms in both English and Chinese through idioms dictionary,then have the semantic analysis about them,to mark out metaphor and metonymy.For example,“ji quan bu ning”(鸡犬不宁),is metaphor,using the active feature of chicken and dog to describe human’s restlessness.“ji quan bu liu”(鸡犬不留)use“ji quan”as a metonymy,which means leaving nothing including chicken and dog.Study the relevant idioms in English,comparing their meanings of metonymy and metaphor with Chinese idioms.Lay emphasis on comparison and description of differences.Query the corpora of English and Chinese,and then work out the operating frequency of metaphor and metonymy meaning of specific idiom.By comparing the frequency of usage,we can verify and reveal that there exist cross-cultural differences between Chinese and English idioms.The metaphorical and metonymic study of English and Chinese animal idioms is not only an enrichment and development of embodied philosophy and cognitive linguistics,but can also contribute to understanding of idioms’cross-culture significance to learners,which has an important significance of language acquisition.