A Contrastive Study of Figurative Meanings of Animal Words between Chinese and English 英汉语言中动物名词喻意比较.docVIP

A Contrastive Study of Figurative Meanings of Animal Words between Chinese and English ? I．Introduction Languages in any country of the world are based on their special cultural background which reflects their unique cultures. Language is a part of culture, simultaneously as the carrier of culture. There is an inseparable relationship between language and culture. The cultural characteristic of a nation and their national thoughts in all aspects of social living must be inflected in languages. Proverbs or idioms are the units which carry richness of cultural significations. From that, people can get lots of effective information about the geography, history, social customs, concepts and attitudes, etc. of a nation. In the long river of historical process, human beings and animals are interlinked and have a deep relationship with each other. Therefore, animal words have a high rate of using in language. The uses of animal words often reflect the differences in aesthetic between different cultures. Culture is the soil of language, and also a historical phenomenon. Each generation inherits the culture established by its forefathers and makes its own contributions to the development of culture; so different nations have different cultures. The similarity between Chinese and English cultures and thinking modes make people associate the same animal words with some same or similar figurative meanings. While those differences in the two cultures always lead to different associations, i.e. Chinese and English people may have different animal vehicles to express the same or similar figurative meanings or the same vehicles with different figurative meanings. In this paper, the author mainly compares the figurative meanings of animal words both in Chinese and English cultures. In the following parts, through the comparison of the figurative meanings, we can see that in the different cultural backgrounds, the same animal vehicles may have same or different figurative meanings; t