Contrastive Study On Semantic Transfer Of Chinese And English Imitative Word

Though almost all languages have imitative word, the study of imitative word in linguistics is rendered a lesser status than that of other word classes. Hopefully, linguists have paid more attention to the study of imitative word in recent years. Chinese and English are representative languages with abundant imitative words. The mainstream studies on Chinese imitative word have long focused on its symbolic property, structure, classification, rhetoric effect,and it is the similar case with the contrastive studies of Chinese and English imitative word. With the development of the society, more and more new things have been emerging, which will primarily be embodied in the semantic entity of words. Imitative word, one of the oldest word, is created through imitating all kinds of natural sounds. It can also express other non-sound meanings, which are transferred from the original sound meaning. The survey and analysis is based on more than four hundred Chinese imitative words and more than one hundred and fifty English imitative words listed in the prestigious dictionaries. Grounded on the metaphor and metonymy theory of cognitive linguistics, the dissertation makes a contrastive and systematic study on Chinese and English imitative words semantic transfer genre, the transfer path, mapping domains, with the findings that owing to the similar living environment and the same psycho and physical responses but the different culture background and internal language structure, English imitative word has more non-sounding transfer meanings than Chinese counterparts, and that the transferred meanings of English imitative word are characterized by complexity, stability and generativeness. The dissertation casts light on the mechanism of the semantic evolution of language in general.