A Comparative Study of Animal Metaphors in Chinese and English

Abstract

This study aims to make an investigation into the nature of metaphor through the cross-cultural comparison of the animal metaphors in English and Chinese. In this study, based on the GREAT CHAIN OF BEING metaphor and the principle of metaphorical highlighting (Kovecses, 2002), the comparison is made between different aspects of animal metaphors in both languages. The results show: some metaphors are identical in the image and highlighted aspects; some are similar in the highlighted aspects but different in the image of animal; some are different with different highlighted aspects of the same image. It can be claimed that metaphors are a mirror of a culture.