Abstract

Metaphor is an important part of a language and an important cognitive method of understanding the objective world. Essentially, the ways of human thinking and even acting are fundamentally metaphorical. And a language reflects the culture of a people, in which metaphor is deep rooted, so metaphor is distinctive in different cultures.
Plants are part of what human beings live by, and people have been closely connected with them in the long history. So both Chinese and English have a large number of plant words. The metaphorical meanings of these plant words have both similarities and differences, which reflects the cultural identities in both peoples. On account of this, this paper intends to make a contrastive analysis of the plant words excerpted from literature works in both languages. In their respective cultural context, this research discusses the similarities and differences of plant metaphorical meanings in Chinese and English, and analyzes the underlying cultural factors. It is found through the analysis that the similarities lie in the universality of cognition and cultures, and the differences lie in different cultural backgrounds in both languages.
In conclusion, the analysis of the similarities and differences of plant metaphors in Chinese and English will be conducive to understanding different linguistic cultures and be contributive to the mutual communication and integration between different cultures.

Key words: plant metaphors, plant words, metaphorical meanings, culture

摘要

隐喻是语言的重要组成部分，是人类认识客观世界的一种重要认知方式，我们的思维方式乃至行为方式本质上是隐喻性的。而语言反映着一个民族的文化，隐喻深深根植于文化之中，不同民族的文化拥有其独特的隐喻方式。
植物是人类赖以生存的一部分，人类在历史的长河中与植物有着密切的联系，因而英汉语言中都存在大量的植物词汇。这些植物的隐喻意义既有相似的一面，又存在许多不同。通过比较英汉植物隐喻的异同，可以反映其文化特点。鉴于此，本文以植物隐喻为研究内容，从英汉文学作品中选出具有代表性的植物词汇进行对比分析，在具体的文化背景里讨论英汉植物隐喻表达意义的异同，并探讨造成这种现象的文化内涵差异。通过分析可知，英汉植物隐喻相同的原因在于人类认知及文化上的共性，导致这种差异的原因在于英汉文化背景不同。
通过对比英汉植物隐喻异同，有利于人们对不同语言文化的理解，促进英汉文化的交流与融合。

关键词： 植物隐喻；植物词；隐喻意义；文化

Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Metaphor has been studied for a long history since Aristotle, a great rhetorician.  Although there is a very long story for the traditional linguistic research of metaphor, it is just considered as a rhetoric way. Until the 1980s in the book Metaphors We Live by, Lakoff and Johnson’s “conceptual metaphor theory” was proposed to make metaphor study get out of the bondage of the traditional theory and connected metaphor with cognition. Since then metaphor is considered not only a kind of linguistic expression, but also the way of human thinking and acting, namely a cognitive phenomenon.