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《蛙》/ua/ (frog) by the Nobel Prize winning Chinese author Mo Yan describes China’s changing its highly controversial one child policy and system of forced abortions over the past half-century. Frog metaphors are omnipresent throughout the novel. The present study aims to investigate these metaphors within the framework of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Frog Metaphors in Mo Yan’s Novel 蛙 /ua/ (Frog) 123 (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and the “GREAT CHAIN OF BEING” system of George Lakoff and Mark Turner (1989) to deepen our understanding of their nature and manifestations. Zoltán Kövecses’s (2002) “HUMAN BEINGS ARE ANIMALS” and “ANIMALS ARE HUMAN BEINGS” were also considered as cognitive metaphorical models. Moreover, the viewpoint of “phonetic metaphor” initially proposed by Ivan Fónagy (1999) was also taken into account. Results were that in Mo Yan’s work, the frog plays an essential role in the conceptualizing conventional views of certain areas in China. The analysis demonstrates how a cognitive approach offers an effective way to explore the cognitive basis of the text’s view on the complex relationship between the basic human rights and the dilemmas of living in a repressive society. This paper also hopes to make a certain contribution to comprehending frog metaphors in terms of more clearly delineated concepts and ideology reflecting China’s real society of a one-child policy and its traditional counter policy notion. 1. Background and Introduction At the end of 2015, China made an important decision to implement a twochild policy, abandoning the decades-old one-child policy which had lasted for a long time throughout modern Chinese history since the late 1970s. The highly controversial one-child policy was introduced by China’s Communist leaders in order to alleviate the great pressure on the population and also to release employment tension. It does seem to have slowed down China's population growth problem and also maintained a steady labor rate. On the other hand, a large number of issues arose as a result of the policy. The Chinese novel 《蛙》 /ua/ (frog), written by Mo Yan-the Nobel Literature Prize laureate of 2012 demonstrates China’s changes over the past half-century concerning the one child policy and also forced abortions. Frogs, as a kind of animal, are seemingly unrelated to China’s one-child policy. Generally speaking, every culture has its symbolic equivalent to the frog a small green animal living near water, an amphibian with long hind limbs for leaping and a source food for predating but none of them is quite like the Chinese frog in Mo Yan's novel, which is potentially associated with fertility worship as a considerable end in itself: 'the character for frogs symbolised a profusion of children, and it has become Northeast Gaomi Township’s totem’ (Goldblatt, 2014 : 351). One of the most salient features of this novel is the application of a large number of frog metaphors, attributable to animal metaphors. However, on the one hand, for the study of 《蛙》/ua/ (frog), previous researches (e.g. Zhao, 2011; Wang, 2011; Guan, 2013; Zuo, 2013; Hu, 2014; Song, 2015; Wu, 2015; Zhu, 2015) were more concerned with traditional literary appreciation concerning aesthetic values and literacy. On the other hand, the majority of animal metaphors studies in the past two decades (e.g. Di, 2006; Li, 2007; Rodríguez, 2009; Liu, 2010; Zhao, MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 20.2, 2017 124 2010; Gao, 2012; He, 2012; Mo, 2012; Liu, 2013; Liu, 2014; Zhang, 2015) have always paid attention to various kinds of animal metaphorical terms in idiomatic phrases and proverbial sayings or contrastive studies between Chinese and other languages. It is obvious that studies using a cognitive linguistic approach to this novel are seriously lacking. Therefore, this paper aims to study frog metaphors from the perspective of cognitive linguistics to explore how these frog metaphors reflect the metaphorical conceptual system of frogs widespread throughout underlying Chinese beliefs and cultural models, establishing a coherence to this novel through its conceptual governance of surface linguistic expressions. Interestingly, the great number of phonetic metaphors used in this novel is another important feature. Actually, different kinds of phonetic metaphors have been widely applied in the areas of advertisements and cyber language (e.g. Li, 2005; Li, 2009; Wu, 2010; Li, 2012; Liu, 2012; Liu, 2013; Liu, 2015; Ma & Zhang, 2016). However, it has seldom been found in research on the phonetic metaphors in literary works, especially in Mo Yan’s works. Consequently, on the basis of an understanding of the cognitive linguistic theories, this paper also analyses frog metaphors from the perspective of phonetic metaphors, which is a new perspective in the field of research on conceptual metaphor. 2. Conceptual Metaphor and Phonetic Metaphor

Frog Metaphors in Mo Yan’s Novel 蛙 /UA55/ (Frog): A Cognitive Perspective