A Comparative Study of English and Chinese Animal “Rooster” Metaphor From the Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

It is universally accepted that cognitive linguistics is a relatively new school of linguistics, and one of the most innovative and intriguing approaches to the study of language and thought. During the past two decades, this cognitive science entered into a new era, especially after Lakoff & Johnson came up with the conceptual metaphor. It argues that our understanding of the world is experiential rather than literal or direct corresponding to and external reality. Besides, our reasoning involves metaphorical inferences; our categories of entities are mostly metaphorical and imaginative. Metaphor is ubiquitous in our thought, action, human language as well as a significant cognitive instrument by which human beings perceive, categorize and conceptualize the world. Among them, animal metaphor is an important category for their rich images and intimate relationship with human beings. Thus the attributes of animals are inevitably mapped onto those human beings.
Many studies have been made about animal metaphor either from cognitive angle or cultural perspective. But animal metaphor is only taken as a whole subject to carry out different studies. Yet this paper will merely discuss metaphors on “rooster” in English and Chinese from cognitive perspective, which aims to contrast and discover the cognitive similarity and differentiation about rooster through a detailed analysis of metaphorical expressions in both languages, and at the same time this paper hopes to make a certain contribution in realizing high-quality cross-cultural communication.