The Cognitive Study Of Chinese Proverbs About Women

Being an important part of the Chinese vocabularies, the proverbs demonstrate the social values of the working people and the cultural systems and values of our nation. For a long time, the study of proverbs has always been a significant matter for lexicology. This thesis studies the proverbs about women in the following three aspects basing on metaphor in the cognitive linguistics.The first part gives a brief introduction to proverbs and proverbs about women. In addition, proverbs about women are classified in accordance with the target domain and source domain. The target domain includes: women’s appearance and age, women’s virture, women’s social status, women’s family status, women’s shortcomings and women’s marriage. The source domain includes:plants, animals, subjects, and concepts.The second part analyzes the proverbs about women basing on the first part. It elaborates the cognitive basis and cognitive processes of proverbs about women and summarizes the cognitive features of proverbs about women. The first one: Various metaphors are used simultaneously. Second: The target domain and the source domain are interlaced. Third: There are a lot of contradictory cognition. Fourth: Women are source domain and their target domain are always negative.The third part analyzes the cognitive features by combining metaphor, natural factors and social culture together and finds that the features of proverbs about women come from not only from the linguistic nature of the source language but also from the natural factors and the social culture. The proverbs reflect the discrimination against women.