On Cultural Mechanism Of Animal Metaphors In Chinese And English-based On Adrim Model

The study of animal metaphors has aroused widespread concern in academia.Many scholars have conducted in-depth research on it.So far,research on understanding mechanisms of animal metaphors includes perspectives such as semantics,sociolinguistics,cognitive linguistics,and cross-cultural comparative analysis.Cognitive linguistic research on animal metaphors was previously limited to traditional Conceptual Metaphor Theory(CMT),Conceptual Blending Theory(CBT),and Relevance Theory(RT).Based on construing semantic rhetorics proposed by Liao Qiaoyun(2015,2018),that is,the Annotation Denotation Relevance-Inheritance Model(ADRIM),the paper explains the metaphorical expression of “ Humans are animals”.This paper collects relevant Chinese and English animal metaphor expressions based on an authoritative English and Chinese dictionary combined with a corpus.First,this paper selects twelve zodiac animal metaphors as the corpus,and then focuses on the extraction of possible features between Chinese and English.The paper raises the following questions:(1)What are the extracted possible features of animal metaphors that make animal metaphors become acceptable?(2)As for two different languages,Chinese and English,what cultural factors affect different possible features between animals and humans? In this paper,qualitative analysis and case analysis are used.Through the previous literature review,animals are divided into several categories,and possible features of each animals which make them become acceptable metaphors are analyzed through specific metaphorical expressions.Then,differential expressions of animal metaphors rely on difficult culture.For example,when the same animal has different metaphorical meanings or different animals have the same metaphorical meaning.The paper concludes that ADRIM,as construing semantic rhetorics framework,has a persuading explanatory power for animal metaphors,which is manifested in the two cognitive domains of animals and humans with many extractable possible features including animal appearance and human appearance,animal behavior and human behavior,animal characteristics and human characteristics as well as animal-human relation.Differentiated animal metaphor expressions in Chinese and English are affected by culture factors such as religion,geography and history,which cannot be neglected.