A Comparative Study Between Horse Idioms In Chinese And English From A Metaphorical Approach

As the most distinctive category in language system, idiom has come to be the quintessence of language development, reflecting different cultural features and connotations. Researchers have approached idiom study from various perspectives such as culture studies, pragmatics, translation studies and rhetoric. Cognitive linguistics that emerged recently have much furthered idiom study. It is the major concern of this paper to compare Chinese idioms and English ones containing the word of horse. Idioms, defined broadly in this paper, include set phrases, proverbs and other fixed expressions. The focus of this paper results from our recognition of the horse as one of the animals tamed by human beings at the very start of human history. The present comparative study is based mainly on the theory of conceptual metaphor in an attempt to explore the following three aspects:1) the types of conceptual metaphor in Chinese and English horse idioms; 2) the similarities and differences in metaphor types between them; 3) the motivation of horse idioms in both languages. Our analysis has come up with the following main findings:1) The metaphor of "people are horses" is found in both languages, mostly with positive connotations; 2) the metaphor of "people are horses" fall into different types in the two languages; 3) the common cognitive thoughts of human race lead to a similar mapping process of Chinese and English horse idioms; 4) Horse idioms in the two languages do differ in motivation involving mindset, history and culture. The present study will hopefully contribute to language study, especially to second language acquisition with some implications for E-C translation and C-E translation.