A Study of Animal Images in Figurative Languages: Horse Metaphors

• Main Authors: Chin, Yun-Han, 金韻涵
• Other Authors: Chen, Yung-Yu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/16005888908414198497

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 跨文化研究所語言學碩士班 === 101 === This thesis aims to investigate a study of animal images in figurative languages by taking horse metaphors as example. In this research, the examples of horse metaphors in Mandarin, English, and Italian will be shown, and all metaphors will be classified by domain as the conceptual metaphor HUMANS ARE HORSES according to Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual models. First of all, the corpuses including horse proverbs/idioms in Mandarin, English, and Italian will be collected from various dictionaries and websites. By a closer examination on the collected data in Mandarin, English, and Italian, it is demonstrated that the closer the interaction humans and animals have, the more vocabulary there may be in language. In addition, the study claims that these linguistic expressions will be retained in language through fossilization and grammaticalization of the conceptual metaphor. Furthermore, the origin of the term “metaphor” will be provided in this study by tracing its history back to Aristotelian age. And the milestone of metaphors in linguistic theory proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson will be discussed. It is indicated that metaphors are not only poetic imagination and rhetorical flourish, but also a linguistic product associated with human concept. With the theories mentioned in this research, the thesis will investigate the metaphorical expressions of horse from the cross-cultural viewpoint. By examining how people use horse as metaphor to describe a person, it is concluded that humans’ mental perception toward the universe is similar even in different languages.