动物隐喻的认知研究_

Chapter 1 Introduction

Animals play a vital role in the life of human beings. From a biological viewpoint, human beings are a genus of animals. Human beings and animals have a lot in common in terms of gene, physical features, actions, and behaviors, etc. Owing to frequent contact with animals, human beings create many animal words in their languages. Metaphor is pervasive in our everyday life, not only in language, but also in our thought and action. Traditionally or rhetorically, metaphor is regarded as a matter of language, whose typical form is “A is B”, and as an implicit comparison between a metaphorical expression and a literal paraphrase based on underlying analogy or similarity in order to achieve certain aesthetic effect. Take the example “Sam is a lion”, when Sam is compared to lion—brave, proud, ferocious, it is more vivid than the plain phrase “Sam is brave”. Here it is a metaphor not in a narrow linguistic sense, but in the sense of rich and complex cognitive models.

According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), a metaphoric cognitive model is a way to structure the knowledge of one domain by mapping onto its concepts and the relations from an existing domain which people are already familiar with. Metaphor in this sense is not a mere linguistic device used only for the figurative embellishment of language, but also a fundamental way of learning and structuring conceptual systems. Furthermore, it is a part of everyday discourse. In my thesis I choose animals as my research target just because few researches have been done on animal metaphors from a cognitive perspective, and most papers regarding animals only explain some simple cultural phenomena from cultural perspectives. In my thesis I attempt to find how animal words are mapped onto human beings and other domains. While making a comparative study of animal metaphors in English and Chinese, I focus on a discussion of the possible reasons for the similarities and dissimilarities of animal metaphor in the two languages by making an exploration into cross-cultural metaphors on its cognitive basis and cultural variation.

1.1 Objectives of this study

The ultimate goal of the thesis is as follows: (1) to find out the similarities and differences of animal metaphors between Chinese and English cultures, in order to have a better understanding of animal metaphors; (2) to find out how animals are mapped onto other domains; (3) to find out the possible reasons of their similarities and differences of animal metaphors in Chinese and English via Chinese and English corpus.

1.2 Significance of this study

With the frequent contact with animals, more and more animal words have got their established connotations in all languages. Many animals have become a kind of symbolism in people’s thinking, and this symbolism is reflected in languages. However, because of different history and culture, the connotations of animal words in one language do not necessarily coincide with those in another. This thesis analyzes animal metaphors from cognitive and cultural perspectives. On the one hand, conceptual metaphor theory is applied to meaning analysis and meaning construction of animal words, which helps students acquire the polysemy of animal words. On the other hand, the study is an attempt to build a bridge of cross-cultural communication between the Chinese and English people.