Comparative The English Animal Proverb Conceptual Metaphor Perspective

Metaphor is seen as a rhetorical method in traditional metaphor research. As time goes by, metaphor becomes a cognitive mechanism. Metaphor is the tool that we use to think and experience the external world, which is seen as'the metaphor we live by'by George Lakoff and Johnson.The animal proverbs are the most vivid collection of language, which are frequently used in daily life, but we seldom consider the animal proverbs as metaphor. In fact, under the frame of conceptual metaphor, the source domain of animal proverbs is animal and the target domain is human or concerned human action. People use the similarities between man and animals to express their motions. This research contrastively analyzes the some animal of animal proverbs both in English and Chinese and tries to find the similarities and differences. The animal image can help us have cognition of the nature and features of human being in English and Chinese.The author draw the conclusion:(1) The Conceptual Metaphor has universality and it is applicable to the contrastive research of Chinese and English animal proverbs; (2)For the same natural property, animal source domain in both English and Chinese proverbs has the similar understanding. But the target domain of Chinese proverbs'cannot correspond to that in English;(3)Differences and similarities are brought by different cognition mode, cultural values and so on.