Gender Roles Reflected in Chinese Botanical Fixed Expressions: Analysis from six dimensions

In the past few decades, we have witnessed an intellectual movement that metaphor, not only serves as a literal ornament, is a powerful tool to reveal people's cognitive process and reflect how people think. As a human being, the property of sex is basic to all people. We metaphorically project the human sexual cognition on the animate and inanimate world. In other words, plant names are not only used to indicate plants but also human beings, males and females. For example, yu4 shu4 lin2 feng1 ¿¿¿ ¿ ¿jade-tree-near-wind; a young man with outstanding appearance and talent.¿ Botanical fixed expressions (BFEs) are gathered mostly from Academia Sinica Ancient Chinese Corpus, and Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus Mandarin Chinese. Six theories are applied to help examine the data from different perspectives. Chinese botanical fixed expressions richly manifest the roles of both sexes and the expectations and stereotypes given by Chinese culture.

International Exchange Student, Linguistics, Department of Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages, San Diego State University, U.S.A. 2007-2008 M.A.,Linguistics,Department of Foreign Languages & Literature, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan. 2008