Personification metaphor in folk tales about animals (an analysis of Russian and Chinese tales)
This article deals with the problems of personification metaphors in Russian and Chinese folk tales about animals. The article analyzes the theory of metaphor of personification in terms of cognitive linguistics, as well as its linguistic aspects. This research is based on the concept of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who proposed to distinguish three types of conceptual metaphors - structural, spatial and ontological metaphors. The personifying metaphor, according to this classification, belongs to the third type. Therefore, it is a kind of ontological metaphor. In this work personification is understood as follows: a natural thing or phenomenon is given human attributes and appearance, for example, the ability to think, feel, talk, etc. This type of metaphorization can be found in various texts, but more often it occurs in folk tales, including tales about animals, which is the material of this study. Universal metaphorical model of this type of folk tales is ANIMAL IS HUMAN, where the source domain - HUMAN, the target domain - ANIMAL, whereby animals in the folk tales endowed with human traits. The metaphor of personification can be expressed by different language units, first of all - lexemes and phraseological units. The article mainly analyzes the lexical means of language, which was characterized from the point of their belonging to one or another part of speech. In view of the diversity on the problem of parts of speech in the Chinese language, including their complete denial, the most common concept shared by the experts was chosen: on the basis of the syntactic criterion, parts of speech, mostly coinciding with those available in other types of languages, are distinguished. The article considers personification of verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs. Verbs are the most liable to the process of metaphorization. Personification of the nouns is less common, while special interest is represented by appellative that reflect the featurs of Russian and Chinese cultures. In Russian fairy tales, only few adjectives and adverbs of personification have been found, in Chinese tales, their number is much larger.