Cultural Diversity in Crossing the Boundaries Between Human and Animal in Language – Germanic and Slavic Similes and Metaphors

The paper is concerned with the occurrence and the functions of nouns referring to animals in the context of similes and metaphors implementing the metaphoric scheme »Human is an Animal«. These phraseological units are the result of repressing the boundary percepts lying between a Human and a Non-Human. The data (5500 entries) is excerpted from English, German, Czech, and Russian phraseological lexicons and texts. The paper deals with the following: classification of animals appearing in the data; the classes are defined as the cross-section between zones of social distance, e.g. relatives, servants, strangers, etc., and zones of physical distance, e.g. house, farm, remote, etc.; establishing indices of popularity of animals; discussion of Sus srofa (the pig) in terms of its symbolic values in Germanic and Slavic cultures. The functional analysis of animal nouns and their referents is supported by quantitative statements