A Contrastive Study Of Animal Images In Chinese And English Classic Nursery Rhymes

Nursery rhymes are one of the earliest literary styles that children come into contact with,and also one of the important media through which children learn about the world.There are many nursery rhymes about animals in both Chinese and English.The animals in children’s songs have the characteristics of concreteness and clarity,which is beneficial to children’s cognition.However,due to the cultural differences between Chinese and English,the animal images in Chinese and English nursery rhymes have both similarities and differences.Taking the schema theory of modern linguistics as the theoretical framework and the Chinese and English classic nursery rhymes as the corpus,this paper makes a comparative analysis of the animal images in nursery rhymes,and discusses the similarities and differences in the description methods,cultural connotations,educational significance and cognitive features of the animal images in Chinese and English classic nursery rhymes.It is found that the animal images in the Chinese and English classic nursery rhymes are both similar and different.Some animal images are similar in the Chinese and English national cognitive schemata,some animal images are far from each other in the Chinese and English national cognitive schemata,and even some animal images are missing in the Chinese and English national cognitive schemata.There are both similarities and differences in the description of animal images in Chinese and English classic nursery rhymes.There are descriptions of animal images in both Chinese and English classic nursery rhymes,but Chinese nursery rhymes pay attention to the specific description of animal images,while English nursery rhymes pay attention to the vague description of animal images.Chinese nursery rhymes focus on the description of local features of animal images,while English nursery rhymes emphasize both overall description and local description.The animal images in the Chinese and English classic nursery rhymes have both common and different cultural connotations.Some animal images have similar cultural connotations in Chinese and English.Some animal images have different cultural connotations between Chinese and English.There are also some animal images which are unique to Chinese and English nations and have unique cultural connotations.The animal images in the Chinese and English classic nursery rhymes also show the same and different characteristics of the enlightenment function.In terms of indoctrination,both Chinese and English classic nursery rhymes focus on the indoctrination in early childhood.Chinese classical nursery rhymes pay more attention to the cultivation of children’s moral character,while English classical nursery rhymes pay more attention to the cultivation of children’s practical ability.In terms of cognitive features,the animal images of Chinese classical nursery rhymes are more inclined to concrete cognition,while the animal images of English classical nursery rhymes are more inclined to abstract cognition.The animal images of Chinese classical nursery rhymes pay more attention to children’s cognitive comprehension,while the animal images of English classical nursery rhymes pay more attention to children’s practical cognition.