A Comparative Study Of Humans Are Animals Metaphors And Mappling Mechanism-a Cognitive Perspective

Metaphor is not just a matter of language, but also a carrier of culture and a vehicle of thought. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claim that metaphor is conceptualized in human's cognition, and involves both conceptual mappings and individual linguistic expressions. Animal metaphors are ubiquitous in world languages. Much of human character is metaphorically understood in terms of animal behavior, character and emotion. Metaphorical highlighting, an important principle in understanding animal metaphors, applies to target domain and shows partial mapping correspondence between source domain and target domain, which contributes to the fact that people from different language backgrounds conceptualize and highlight the same entity differently.Many Chinese scholars study and analyze animal metaphors on the basis of metaphorical highlighting principle which is only proved in the application to animal metaphors in Chinese. However, simply giving examples and conducting no systematic analysis can not explain the root of mapping mechanism between English and Chinese. This paper underlines working mechanism of "GREAT CHAIN OF BEING" as theoretical framework, along with metaphorical highlighting principle, and conducts a better analysis of animal metaphors and mapping mechanism.This paper is mainly divided in two parts. First, three hundred and eighteen examples in two languages are analyzed according to metaphorical highlighting. The results show us that there exist similarities and differences of mapping mechanism in English and Chinese. Both concrete and abstract categories in source domain are highlighted in target domain with more abstract concept; mapping mechanism is shaped by physical and cultural experience, and reflects human's cognition and understanding of the world. Second, this paper explores the language features of animal metaphors which are semantic duality and semantic unitary. Last but not least, the factors of understanding metaphors, as guidance of learning English are explored.It is concluded that, from mapping mechanism which is central to our thought and understanding, we see that language is inclusive and flexible. Meanwhile, this conclusion sheds light on metaphor, language and cognitive linguistic study.