A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Animal Metaphor From Perspective Of Palmer's Cultural Linguistics

Metaphor is a prevailing language phenomenon in people's daily conversations and writings. It is also a vital cognitive tool for people to create new language and learn about the world. Thus, the study of metaphor enjoys a long history. This history could be traced back to ancient time when Aristotle firstly made a relatively systematic study in his famous works—Rhetoric and Poetics. From then on, metaphor has been simply regarded as a kind of figurative method that could make language more persuasive and poetic for a long period. After Lakoff and Johnson propose the cognitive function of metaphor, which gives metaphor a more important role and evokes the interest of different academic areas, the study of metaphor is widely spread based on kinds of theories.Animal metaphor, which refers to the metaphor that involves the image of animal, has also been a popular subject studied by many scholars. Animal plays an important part in people's production progress and social development. The relationship between animal and human beings is so close that people tend to use the image of animal to convey ideas and feelings and thus there are a lot of animal metaphors in people's languages. The application of animal metaphor makes the language more vivid and also reflects people's cognition of the world. The comparative study of animal metaphor has been done by some authors, but the previous comparative study of animal metaphor is mainly based on the semantic theory and cognitive theory.This thesis adopts the core idea of cultural linguistics, which is established by G. B. Palmer, who borrows a lot from linguistic anthropology and combines it with modern cognitive theory. His major thought is that culture, cognition and language are an entity. Since animal metaphor is an indispensible part of language, it is also greatly influenced by cultural factors from many aspects. So the writer makes a tentative comparative study of animal metaphor between English and Chinese and analyzes the reasons that cause the diversity from relevant cultural perspectives, trying to find a new angle to investigate animal metaphor. The writer also supports the cultural factors that influence animal metaphor with sufficient examples and hopes to give some insight and help for further study in this area.