Abstract：Language is one of the most important methods of human communication, and vocabulary is the basis of language. Chinese vocabularies have various metaphor meanings, while English vocabularies have many metaphor meanings too. The same objects have different metaphor meanings in different cultures, geography and social class and so on, which makes many scholars confused. The method in this research is a contrastive study, according to which we are going to make a contrastive of the animal metaphors between English and Chinese to achieve the goal of this research. The purpose of this paper is to make scholars have a better knowledge about mechanism of metaphor, structural metaphor, orientational metaphor and ontological metaphor, from which the scholars can have a better understanding of animal metaphor meanings both in English and Chinese.

Key words: Metaphor Structural, Metaphor, Orientational Metaphor,  Ontological Metaphor, animal metaphor.

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction-1

2. Literature review-2

2.1. Traditional study of Metaphor-2

2.2. Modern Linguistic Studies of Metaphor.-2

2.3. Cognitive Linguistic Studies of Metaphor-3

3. Theoretical basis:-4

3.1. Mechanism of Metaphor-4

3.2. Structural Metaphor-5

3.3. Orientational Metaphor .-5

3.4. Ontological Metaphor-6

4. Data analysis and discussio-7

4.1. Animal Metaphors in Chinese-8

4.1.1. Structural Metaphor-9

4.1.2. Orientational Metaphor-9

4.1.3. Ontological Metaphor-10

4.2. Animal Metaphors in English-10

4.2.1. Structural Metaphor-10

4.2.2. Orientational Metaphor-10

4.2.3. Ontological Metaphor-11

4.3. The Similarities of animal Metaphor in Chinese and English-12

4.4. The Differences of animal Metaphor in Chinese and English-12

5. Conclusion-13

Bibliography-13

Acknowledgments-14