THE UNIVERSAL AND CULTURAL SPECIFIC IMAGE OF ANIMALS IN ENGLISH, ROMANIAN AND RUSSIAN IDIOMS
THE UNIVERSAL AND CULTURAL SPECIFIC IMAGE OF ANIMALS IN ENGLISH, ROMANIAN AND RUSSIAN IDIOMS

Summary/Abstract: Idiomatic expressions are considered special creations of various languages as they reflect the specific cultural way the people think and bear a metaphoric or metonymic meaning. Moreover cognitive linguistics says that we perceive the reality by means of our body and environment, thus various cultures makes use of similar linguistic means to render various cultural scenarios with cases of universal linguistic representation of similar cultural patterns. Since old times writers used to speak about various vices of humans by means of animal images so as to soften the criticism and the process of deriding the weaknesses of people. However, the existing linguistic expressions were constructed in the course of language development being influenced by some previous common writings as the religious books and common human dwellings since ancient times thus explaining the common cases of associating similar animals with similar situations cross-culturally. The idioms that differ among various languages witness about the different mentality of the humans representing different cultures. In this study we compare the images of domestic animals in English, Romanian and Russian so as to identify the possible similar cases and most important, those culturally specific ones so as to help in understanding which way to conduct an intercultural communication in a correct way.

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