概念隐喻视角下中英女性称谓动物化的对比研究(3)
1.2 Significance of the Study
Animal resources are always the important material base of human productivity. Harmonious coexistence of humans and animals, which is reflected by such as Zodiac in China or Mythology in the West, plays a significant guiding role in human beings modern society. During a long history of social activities, humans unconsciously have linked living habits and qualities of animal to some phenomena of human society so that quantities of animal metaphors emerged in literary works and spoken languages. Therefore, the formation of ‘man is an animal’ conceptual metaphor actually can be defined as that humans map out the images, features and habits from animals to human society, which ‘woman is an animal’ is an extension of the concept of ‘man is an animal’. Humans tend to find out their own characteristics from animals.
On this basis, established cognition, which has virtually constituted the impression concept, is projected into the cognitive world of reality, unceasingly enriching knowledge for understanding the nature and thereby having a restricted view of habits of thinking, aesthetics, cultural sediment between different nations because they may be correspondingly coincident or wide variations or vacant or unique (Zhao Qian, 2010). The thesis may contribute a little to the study of animalized appellation of females from the perspective of conceptual metaphor in both English and Chinese. Furthermore, the thesis contrasts the two different language tendencies on the choices of animal metaphor texts and tries to dig out the underlying reasons and helps awaken females who are suffering from language discrimination and gives some inspiration for future animal metaphor usage.