Comparative Study On Associative Meaning Of Diet Words In Chinese And Vietnamese From The Cognitive Perspective

The friendship between China and Vietnam has been developing increasingly in recent years, especially the economic and education. There are more and more Vietnamese choose learning Chinese language, at the same time, more and more Chinese people learnt Vietnamese. The associative meaning of bilingual vocabulary causes language barrier and difficulty during the language learning and communication.This thesis chooses foods and drinks vocabularies, the closest words to our life as the study object. The most purpose is contrastive study the Vietnamese-Chinese food and drink associative meaning and human cognition, to mention the similarities and differences. It discusses the relative affections in the process of investigation and analysis, for example, natural environment, historical culture, customs and habits, values, mode of thinking, cognitive module. The food and drink associative meaning has rich culture background because it reflects a national psychological concept, social life, historical culture, customs habits and cognitive module. To comprehend a national associative meaning’s way can understand the national language cultural affections beside different languages rapidly. Therefore, more rich national cultures can be got from the vocabulary associative meaning research, and comprehend the nation customs interest and social life.This thesis compares and researches Vietnamese-Chinese food and drink vocabularies comprehensive base on the principal of associative meaning and cognitive metaphors. I took notice of the discussion of Vietnamese-Chinese words and Vietnamese words, and to point out the similarities and differences in application. The research helps the linguistic communication, foreign Chinese learning and teaching.Through the inspection and analysis, I found that the Vietnamese and Chinese catering vocabularies associative meaning extension path is base on similarity and proximity of association, through metaphor and metonymy reflects to the other targets domain zones from food and drink zone. The target domain zone are very rich, include describe human appearance, characters, behaviors, attitudes, experiences, and so on. This thesis uses the "eating is the life" as the basic conceptual metaphors, which carry out research direction, found that each member belongs to a diet activities and human aspects closely. The taste of the meaning of words and the cognitive activities are mainly transferred to describe all kinds of mood and feelings of people of the target domain. The cookery words meaning transform to the target domain of describe behavior and experience through the cognitive activities. The diet word meaning transforms to describe human life experience and encounter through the cognitive activities. In this paper, through the investigation and study, the Chinese and Vietnamese diet words associative meaning, the author found that there are many similarities, the two national cognitive patterns and ways of thinking, there are several main reasons: At first, the two countries are neighbors, so much alike in the same geographical environment, economic aspects of an agricultural country, leading to the two in the product and the living habits of similar.The second, the different of history and communication leads to cross-culture between the two countries. In the exchange process, there are many factors of language, cultural aspects of the introduction of culture of Vietnam and Vietnamese from Chinese culture and Chinese (Sino-Vietnamese words is the most obvious traces of cross-cultural). Vietnam is also country which belong to the Chinese cultural circle, so the two nation in the values, religious and cultural are similar. The associative meaning of Chinese and Vietnamese diet words different from most causes of two nationalities characteristic, folk culture, customs, historical evolution and so on. As neighbors, the two countries in national culture are also similar and close. But the peoples has different of contacting things and experience, and the different natural environment, customs, values and other aspects, leading different associative thinking of two minority languages. So the associative meanings of Chinese-Vietnamese foods words has its own characteristics, with a the special cultural characteristics.