A Comparative Study of Different Cultural Connotations of the Word “Rat” in Chinese and English Online Language

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_210How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Comparative study; Online Animal Metaphor; Cultural connotation

Abstract

Rat is a kind of animal that is familiar among humans, but due to the behaviors of stealing food and spreading disease, the cultural connotation and animal metaphors have become negative in almost traditional cultures. In the metaphor area, here are many comparative studies about animal metaphors of different animals in Chinese and English. Recently, new animal metaphors about “rat” in online language are also widely used, but there were scant studies about the new online animal metaphors. Moreover, there is no study that only focuses on animal metaphors about “rat,” which is a research gap. This comparative study focuses on the difficulties for foreigners to acquire new online animal metaphors about “rat” and their cultural connotations in Chinese and English, along with the differences between traditional animal metaphors and new online ones. To find out the results, two new animal metaphors “Shu Ren” and “Jie Dui Zi” in Chinese and two new ones “Internet rat” and “RAT” in English are investigated. During the analysis, the origins and cultural connotations of these new online animal metaphors are found respectively and compared. The results show that new animal metaphors can be used as self-mockery instead of only describing others, and they appear due to the recent social phenomena. Moreover, the four factors of the difficulties for foreigners to acquire new online animal metaphors and their cultural connotations are society, politics, convention and language. Furthermore, this study can contribute to the area of metaphor for arising people’s awareness of metaphor knowledge in animals, especially rats.

Copyright

© 2022 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Hengxiao Liu
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/30
TI  - A Comparative Study of Different Cultural Connotations of the Word “Rat” in Chinese and English Online Language
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 5th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1832
EP  - 1840
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_210
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_210
ID  - Liu2022
ER  -