A Conceptual Metaphor Theory Approach To Animal Metaphors

During the past decades, cognitive science has greatly changed people's understanding of the world. Conceptual metaphor theory, as a crucial theory, has changed people's traditional view of metaphor. Cognitive linguists maintain that the essence of metaphor is the use of one object to understand and experience another. People's thought and inference are generally metaphorical, and people's cognition of the world is based on experience.Animals play an important role in every aspect of people's life, so do animal expressions in the language of human beings. We can see that there are a large number of animal metaphors in both English and Chinese. The author chooses animal expressions as the subject of the study, applying Lakoff and Johnson'Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Lakoff and Turner's concept of Great Chain Metaphor, and holds that there exists a conceptual metaphor HUAMN IS ANIMAL. The attributes of animals can be mapped onto humans in the following aspects: appearance, behavior, character and sound. So we find that there are four sub-metaphors: HUAMN APPEARANCE IS ANIMAL APPEARANCE, HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS ANIMAL BEHAVIOR, HUMAN CHARACTER IS ANIMAL CHARACTER, HUMAN SOUND IS ANIMAL SOUND.The author also finds that there are some differences between English and Chinese animal metaphors, since people in different cultures have different cognition towards animals. And in both cultures, there exists the semantic derogation towards females.Although this analysis of animal metaphors has some limitations, to some extent it still has theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, it offers abundant evidences to the study of similarity and the individuality of English and Chinese metaphors. So it enriches the research of conceptual metaphor. Practically, on the one hand, it provides some hints for foreign language teaching; and it may enhance foreign language learners'cross-cultural communicative ability.