A Contrastive Study Of Horse-related Idioms In Chinese And English: A Conceptual Metaphorical Approach

Animals are closely linked to human’s life. They play very important roles during the process of human’s development, thus becoming the indispensable parts in people’s daily life and production. There are a large number of animal-related words in Chinese and English, including the large numbers of animal idioms. All of them are easily structured but have deep figurative meanings and can be used to indicate the various kinds of social phenomena. Among all the animal idioms, horse-related idioms are widely applied to the two languages as horses affect the development of humans to a large extent. In ancient China and England, horses are mainly used as the tools in wars and also the communicative tools. Nowadays, horses are mainly used in the areas of sports and entertainment. Accordingly, most of the horse-related idioms have commendatory connotations and few of them have derogatory meanings.Based on the earlier researches, I mainly present the current research status and the existing problems. The researches of idioms abroad are mainly conducted from the following three perspectives: formal perspective, functional perspective and psycholinguistic perspective. But there are nearly no researches about the animal idioms and the horse-related idioms are of no exceptions. The researches at home mainly focus on the contrastive analysis of animal idioms in Chinese and English and discuss the translation skills and the different cultural connotations of different animal idioms. The similarities and differentiations of the same animal idioms are also involved in the previous researches. Besides, there are also many other scholars analyzing the application of animal idioms in the second language teaching process. But there still exist many problems in the current researches about animal idioms. There are only a few researches analyzing the animal idioms from the perspective of cognitive conceptual metaphor. The lack of width and depth are also presented in the certain animal idioms researches.Moreover, the metaphorical meanings and cultural connotations of horse-related idioms are different in Chinese and English, so the study of horse-related idioms can help us better understand the cultural differences and national characters in the two countries. Accordingly, it can guide us to have a more comprehensive understanding about the Chinese horse-related idioms and the English horse-related idioms and help us to understand the different ways of thinking among the Chinese and British people so as to overcome obstacles in cross-cultural communications to some extent. Due to the analysis, people can achieve the goals of more accurate uses of Chinese and English idioms.Therefore, this paper regards the Chinese and English horse-related idioms as the research objects, mainly intends to answer the following questions:1. How the horse-related idioms in Chinese and English are classified based on the conceptual metaphor theory?2. What are the similarities and differences about the metaphorical meanings of the Chinese and English horse-related idioms?3. What are the reasons for the similarities and differences of the Chinese and English horse-related idioms?In this paper, I mainly adopt the quantitative and qualitative analysis methodologies. Based the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the author make a contrastive analysis on Chinese and English horse-related idioms from the famous dictionaries and monographs like The New Oxford English-Chinese Dictionary, Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Webster’s New World College Dictionary, and Bible and many others. The metaphorical meanings of horse-related idioms in Chinese and English will be mapped onto people’s life in various aspects, such as people, things, states, emotions, and symbols and so forth. The similarities and differences will also be presented in this paper, including the causes of the phenomenon, thus helping people better understand the cultural connotations of horse-related idioms in the two languages.Through the analysis, this paper draws the following conclusions: 1) Horse-related idioms are very common in Chinese and English, and most of them have the same cultural connotation due to the cultural overlaps in the two countries. 2) The appearance, habits, and characters of horses can be mapped onto the corresponding characters of different areas among human beings to form the same metaphorical meanings of horse-related idioms. 3) Both of the two languages choose to highlights the robust, elegant, and beautiful characters of horses so as to express the commendatory emotional attitudes of people. 4) Because of the different roles horses play in history, there will be a certain semantic vacancy in Chinese and English which result in the cross matching of horse and cattle idioms in the two languages. 5) The unique horse-related idioms in Chinese and English are largely related to their own historical allusions, literature works, fairy tales, and daily life and so forth. 6) There are many factors which affect the differences of the metaphorical meanings of Chinese and English horse-related idioms, such as the different religious beliefs, the geographical environment, and the cultural customs and so forth.The shining point is that this paper conducts the research with the particular animal “horse” as the research object, to analyze the similar and different metaphorical meanings of horse-related idioms in Chinese and English based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, thus enriching the metaphorical connotations of the animal idioms, enlarging the research scope of conceptual metaphors, and helping readers understand and study the essence and characters of idioms from a new perspective.