earticle

영어

Over the years much interest has been paid to the research of idioms and metaphors in cognitive semantics. Not surprisingly then, there has been a good deal of related research, however, there are relatively few studies on animal figurative expressions. The present study aims to examine metaphorically extended meanings of wild animal figurative expressions in French through 3 representative corpora’s analysis. For this purpose, eight wild animal words loup(wolf), renard(fox), serpent(snake), ours(bear), poisson(fish), oiseau(bird), canard(duck), ver(worm) , 145 related figurative expressions and 1,646 uses in corpora were analyzed and categorized based on semantic molecules. Our findings show that firstly, eight wild animals’ figurative expressions and their extended meanings could be categorized. Which related to five components such as human being, event, object & abstract, time and arbitrary construction. Secondly, there were differences in semantic categories of figurative expressions according to animals. For example, ‘malevolence’, ‘cruelty’ and ‘greed’ are the most frequent semantic molecules associated with ‘loup(wolf)’, whereas, ‘rudeness’ and ‘coarseness’ are conceptualized in ‘ours(bear)’. Furthermore, wild animal expressions demonstrate different French speakers’ modes of thought and cognition compared with ‘plant’ based figurative meanings.