Abstract and Key Words

Abstract: Both English and Chinese have abundant animal idioms. Animal words and expressions are the carrier of different cultural information. They have special national characters, which reflect distinctive and common cultural connotation. This paper compares animal idioms in English and Chinese, and focuses from a cross-cultural perspective on exploring the cultural differences, which not only exist between Chinese and English culture but also among different English-speaking countries. By comparing and contrasting the idioms background, associative meaning, hot topic, emotions etc, one can have deeper understanding of the different culture. Cultural contrast should be incorporated into the foreign language teaching curriculum. During cross-cultural communication one should seek common ground while acknowledging the differences, and keep flexible. This thesis is aimed to give advice to promote cross-cultural communication.

Key words: animal idioms; cross-culture; connotation; cultural differences

摘要：英汉语言中都有大量的动物习语。动物词汇及表达承载着不同的文化信息，带有鲜明的民族特征，体现了特有的及共性的文化内涵。本文通过对英汉动物习语的对比，主要从跨文化角度探讨文化差异，这种文化差异不仅存在于中英两种文化之间，也存在于不同的英语国家间。研究这些习语的背景，联想意义，热门话题，感情色彩等方面的异同，可以加深人们对不同文化的理解。在外语教学中加入文化的对比，在跨文化交际过程中求同存异，灵活运用。旨在为促进跨文化交流提出建议。

关键词：动物习语；跨文化；文化内涵；文化差异

1. Introduction
In the long history of human civilization, animal co-exist with human and are closely related to people’s everyday life. People have complicated feelings towards different animals, so animal related expressions are formed. Due to different culture, geographical environment and other reasons, cultural meanings and connotation of animal expressions are different. In this thesis, the differences in cultural meanings and connotation of animal expressions are presented and the cultural differences are studied further. The aim of this thesis is to give advice to more effective language learning and smoother intercultural communication. This thesis is composed of five chapters with the first one offering a brief explanation of the choice of the research topic and the outline of the whole thesis. Chapter two gives a literature review and presents the current research status and linguistic features of animal idioms also some hot issues related to it. Chapter three provides an exposition in details that the culture reasons contribute to differences in animal expressions. Then come to Chapter four that discusses the treatment and utilization of animal expressions in cross-culture communication. The last Chapter draws a conclusion to the whole thesis.