A Metaphorical Analysis Of Chinese Dragon Idioms

There are a large number of idioms,and this thesis mainly focuses on the idioms with the word “dragon”.The author calls it “Chinese dragon idioms” temporarily.Dragon is not the substance in real life,but an abstract species imagined by the ancient Chinese people.People endow it with image,personality and cultural significance,which lead to the mystery of Chinese culture.The idioms with the word “dragon” are vivid and profound.The formation mechanism and the existence significance of these idioms are the main content of this paper.This thesis will mainly solve two research problems.The first one is what conceptual metaphors contained by collected Chinese dragon idioms? The second one is that how many kinds of conceptual metaphors in Chinese dragon idioms under metaphorical thinking? As for the first research question,this thesis primarily adopts the conceptual metaphor theory,namely the relationship between source domain and target domain,in illustration.As for the second research question,this thesis applies metaphorical thinking and culture model theory to defend the argument.This thesis analyzes the four-character idioms containing “dragon” on the basis of conceptual metaphor,metaphorical thinking and culture model theory.The author found that based on classifying target domain,the attribute which is modified by Chinese dragon idioms,there are four conceptual metaphors and they all belong to ontological metaphor.Secondly,because of the feature of metaphorical thinking,conceptual metaphors divide into metaphor,symbolization and imagination in Chinese dragon idioms;these idioms are closely and inseparably related to social environment.Through the statistics and analysis of this kind of idioms,the formative reasons of the four-character idioms containing “dragon” is cognitively explained;also hope that this thesis through the dragon idioms analysis to some extent explains the formative reasons of the four-character idioms containing abstract things from the conceptual metaphor,and reveals the emergence and generated reasons.The research of conceptual metaphor about idioms is enriched.Meantime,the study can promote the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language and cultural exchange to a certain extent.