A Cultural Cognitive Study Of Ma/Horse Metaphors In Chinese And English

Horses,as the helpful tool and imitate partner of human beings,have played a vital role in various fields of people's life,including traffic,production,sports,and entertainment.They are related so closely to people that there are a number of expressions about horses applied in languages.During the procedure of understanding themselves and the world,people use this familiar animal to understand human traits or things that are more abstract or strange to a certain extent.This linguistic phenomenon can be commonly seen in both Chinese and English,which offers a valuable angle of linguistic research.In the early stage,scholars started with animal metaphors in a more general view,mainly including linguistic studies,literature studies,and social studies.As researchers being not satisfied with the overall study and wanting more specific ones,the point was focused on expressions of one specific animal.Studies of horse-related ones have been conducted from the perspective of linguistics and culture but the two themes were discussed separately.Even though some studies mentioned the importance of culture,it was thought just as one element of all.For those cultural linguistic studies,few talked about horse expressions instead of taking them as the major part.However,the situation does exist that some horse metaphors are used in a different way in Chinese and English,which is in concerned with the culture of different nations.Therefore,based on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory in Cognitive Linguistics and Cultural Conceptualization Theory in Cultural Linguistics,for one thing,this thesis concentrates on the metaphorical meanings of horse metaphors in Chinese and English.Through contrastive study,the subject of this research mainly consists of metaphorical expressions about horses in Chinese,while English horse metaphors will be analyzed as a contrast and supplement.For the other,the background cultural elements of similarities and differences of horse metaphors in Chinese and English are also the main part of this study.With analytical tools of Cultural Linguistics,especially the analysis ofcultural metaphors,the relationship between culture and horse metaphors will be explored more effectively and analyzed more reliably.This study is carried out by the linguistic data collected from The Great Chinese Dictionary(http://www.hydcd.com/)and an integrated English dictionary website(https://www.thefreedictionary.com/).With the assistance of other dictionaries,including A Comprehensive Dictionary of English Idioms and Phrases and A Usage Dictionary of English and Chinese Conceptual Metaphors,and two corpus websites:British National Corpus(BNC)and Chinese National Corpus.Meanwhile,driven by the data collected from above sources and theories,two methods are employed in this study,namely qualitative and quantitative research method,with the attempts to answer the following questions:What are the similarities and differences of target domains of horse metaphors in Chinese and English?What are the cultural cognitive interpretations for the similarities and differences of horse metaphors in Chinese and English?After the identification,categorization and analysis of the collected linguistic data,this thesis draws the following conclusion on its major findings to answer the two questions:(1)Horse metaphors are used with the same target domains in both languages in the following categories: HUMAN CHARACTERISTICS AS HORSE,WOMEN AS HORSE,WORKERS AS HORSE,SPEED AS HORSE,POWER AS HORSE,GENERALIZED THINGS AS HORSE and POLITICS AS HORSE.However,some horse metaphors only exist in either Chinese or English,like IMPOSSIBLE THINGS AS HORSE,TIME AS HORSE,CAPABLE OR IMCAPABLE PEOPLE AS HORSE,LIFE CONDITIONS AS HORSE,IDEA AS HORSE,and SPIRIT AS HORSE specifically in Chinese;and EMOTIONS AS HORSE,RIDICULOUS THINGS AS HORSE,COMMERCIAL ACTIVITIES AS HORSE,and USELESS THINGS AS HORSE specifically in English.(2)Horse metaphors,especially the differences of them in Chinese and English,are largely influenced by cultural elements of the two different countries.Among them,geographical features initially affected the economic forms of different countries,which further influenced the determination of social institutions and values of different nations.Moreover,religious beliefs,literature views,and folkcustoms,as a major part of cultures,are also crystalized in languages to pass on from generation to generation.Under the trend of globalization,cultural bleeding is a factor full of particularity of times.Some horse metaphors are in fact borrowed from foreign languages and internalized as daily expressions in the native language.Significances of this study can be summarized from two aspects into the following points.With a view to the theoretical aspect,(1)there were few that concentrate on metaphors of a specific kind of animals in previous studies,so this could be a supplement for relative metaphor research comparing the two languages,offering the reference for further studies.(2)Cultural cognitive factors are employed to discuss the motivations of similarities and differences,providing a new take for studies on animal metaphors and adding relatively novel insights into existing ones.With a view to the Practical aspect,(3)The study on horse metaphors in Chinese and English provides a fresh perspective for the role of cultural knowledge in foreign language learning and highlights the importance for language learners to be exposed to cultural elements of the target language.(4)For interpretation of metaphors in two languages,this thesis works as a complement for translators and scholars to transfer more concrete information.In summary,it could help not only foreign learners but Chinese themselves to think over words they use every day in a metaphorical way and eventually gain better understanding of the relation between their culture,thought,and language.