中西文化对隐喻的影响

隐喻是人们赖以生存的一种语言现象和认知模式,它受社会文化背景影响,表现出明显的文化特征。从隐喻与语言、文化、思维密不可分的关系入手,分析了英汉两种文化中隐喻表达和理解的共性,以及中西文化差异在隐喻中的体现,通过大量的实例指出相似的文化背景会形成相似的隐喻,而不同的文化因素也会映射在隐喻中,进而影响到人们认知世界的方式。

Cultural Influences on English and Chinese Metaphors

As a common language phenomenon and cognition mode we live by,metaphor is influenced by the social cultural background and shows obvious cultural characteristics.Starting from the close relations between metaphor,language,culture,and human thought,this paper analyzes the similarities of metaphor expressing and understanding in English and Chinese cultures,and explores the cultural differences reflected in metaphors as well.Through a large number of examples,it is pointed out that similar cultural background may lead to similar metaphors,while cultural differences will also be mapped onto everyday metaphorical expressions which influence people's cognizing the world.