A Study Of The Animal And Plant Metaphors In Aesop's Fables From The Perspective Of Cognitive Approach To Language

Fable is a literary genre that expresses profound truth through animal and plant stories,aiming at giving people enlightenment and lessons.Aesop's Fables,as a representative work of Western fable literature,is circulated worldwide and enjoys a great popularity among readers.Previous studies have focused on the comparative analysis of fables between China and the West,as well as the translation and education of fables.Though they are also concentrated on the comprehension of fables,less attention has been paid to the way of fable comprehension from the perspective of conceptual metaphor.The purpose of this study is to allow people to have a deeper understanding of fables by investigating the cognitive mechanism of animal and plant metaphors in fables.On the basis of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory,this study systematically analyses the distribution and construction of animal and plant metaphors in Aesop's Fables,so as to reveal the relationship between the thinking mode of conceptual metaphor and the moral of fable.In this study,the English version of Aesop's Fables,published by World Book Company,is selected as the data.On the one hand,the identification and statistics of animal and plant metaphors are based on the definition of conceptual metaphor.By a comparative analysis of the distribution of two metaphors,the experiential basis and cognitive motivation of personification metaphors in fables can be concluded.On the other hand,this study illustrates the diverse qualities of human beings constructed by animal and plant metaphors and reveals the working mechanism of animal and plant metaphors,then on this basis,puts forward the approach of fable comprehension.The result shows that,firstly,there are 450 animal metaphors in Aesop's Fables,covering 63 different species of animals,and 21 plant metaphors with 14 species of plants involved.It can be seen that the number of animal metaphors is far more than that of plant metaphors,which is consistent with the Great Chain of Being Metaphor proposed by Lakoff,namely,animals and humans bear higher similarity in the hierarchical chain,which is easier to stimulate metaphorical association.In addition,in plant metaphors,trees with higher similarity to human appearance are adoptedmore frequently as well,which estimates that the construction of metaphor is based on the similarity between two conceptual domains.Secondly,a comprehensive study of the working mechanism of animal and plant metaphors explains that there are personification metaphors that PLANT and ANIMAL as the source domain project into the target domain PERSON.The metaphors contain two mapping processes,which are to personify animals and plants first by endowing some human characteristics to them,and then use these animals and plants with human characteristics to understand human qualities.The mapping processes are partial and incomplete.Lastly,based on the exploration of cognitive mechanism in animal and plant metaphors,this study holds that moral comprehension experiences three procedures,namely metaphor recognition,metaphorical mapping and moral inference.Among this,metaphor recognition and metaphorical mapping need a consciousness of conceptual metaphorical thinking and a well understanding of the working mechanism of metaphor.And moral inference requires readers to have a broad recognition of human common experience and world knowledge.Moreover,the understanding of metaphors in a specific ethnic group demands relevant cultural knowledge.The study of the cognitive mechanism of animal metaphors and plant metaphors in Aesop's Fables not only provides a new perspective and route for better understanding and appreciating fables,but also,to a certain extent,supplements the metaphor study of fables.Detailed discussion on cultural factors affecting the comprehension of animal and plant metaphors has not been carried out in this study,which can serve as the direction for further study of metaphors in fables.