The Cultural Analysis Of Animal Metaphors In Chinese And English

Metaphor has been studied and theorized for a long history of over two thousand years. It can be traced back to Aristotle in ancient Greece, who treated metaphor as a rhetorical and stylistic device only used to enrich poetic and literary writings. Since the publication of Metaphors We Live By in1980s, Lakoff and Johnson have opened an epoch-making cognitive approach to metaphor studies. Recently, scholars have begun to dig deeper so to find that metaphor is a form not only of speaking, but also more fundamentally of thinking, casting much light on what can be understood as a cultural perspective of metaphor studies.This thesis is based on the conceptual metaphor "HUMAN IS ANIMAL" proposed by Kovecses, who claims that "Much of human behavior seems to be metaphorically understood in terms of animal behavior". And that is also the reason why we choose animal metaphor as our interest. Although the scholars have done well in the contrastive analysis of Chinese and English animal metaphors, they did not try too much in explaining thoroughly the reasons for the similarities and differences from a cultural perspective. So in this thesis, through the cultural analysis of animal metaphors in Chinese and English, the following is found:the similarities result from the similar thinking culture, natural culture and humane culture, while reasons for the differences lie in natural and physical environment, values, religious cultures, literary factors, ethnic psychology and historical cultures. In foreign language learning, animal metaphors closely linked with connotations are difficult to understand. This thesis attempts to further excavate the cultural roots under the similarities and differences in order to give more implication to the translation of animal metaphors, especially the foreignization strategy and domestication strategy in translating literary works.