A Metaphorical Study Of Animal Proverbs In English

Metaphor in human life is very important, it can be said that metaphor exists everywhere in life, on the one hand, it reflects the world people who are ready to know. On the other hand, it plays an important role as a language form, which influences people’s thinking of real world. In this paper, the author studies the animal proverbs based on the theories of Conceptual Metaphor, especially the theory of “Human beings are animals”. From this perspective, to analyze how its appearances, behaviors, features and other aspects, which can be regarded as source domains, are mapped into parts of human beings with the metaphorical meanings in such kind of animal proverbs.This paper has five parts. Generally, the brief introduction about the objective, the referred methodology and the outline of the paper have been showed in chapter one; Chapter two shows the literature review at home and abroad, to be clearer, all the studies collected here have been divided into four types, that is cultural aspect, cognitive aspect, literary aspect and semantic aspect; Chapter three is the statement of theoretical background. It contains the historical development from classical metaphor to conceptual metaphor, especially the “Great Chain of Being” proposed by Lakoff and Turner. What’s more, the theory of “Human Beings Are Animals” and its mapping mechanism are described in detail. Based on the conceptual metaphor and other theories, in chapter 4, more than 200 animal proverbs has been collected from A Dictionary of English Proverbs edited by Xu Zhusheng. All the animal proverbs have been divided into three types: domestic animal proverbs, wild animal proverbs and imagined animal proverbs. The author specifically analyzes how the mechanism works well from source domain(animals) to target domain(human beings) and how the expressions have the metaphorical meanings. Furthermore, the contribution of the paper is that different animals have different using frequency, animals of the same type as well. From this aspect, some possible reasons have been alleged in this part, such as the reasons of human beings, the reasons of animals and the correlations between human beings and animals; At last, chapter five is the conclusion and the limitation of this paper.