Chinese And English Nominal Classifier Structures: A Cognitive Metonymic Account

Since it is a common phenomenon in all human languages to identify the quantitative elements of things or objects, there are functionally similar expressions to refer to quantity in both Chinese and English. Chinese being kind of classifier language, there are the mature quantified categories in the linguistic system called classifiers and the fixed structures "Number +Classifier+Noun" and "Verb+Number+Classifier". Many scholars in China have done the researches on classifiers from the perspectives of rhetoric, pragmatics, English-Chinese contrast, semantics and cognition and so forth, which have achieved a great success. Especially, along with the naissance and growth of cognitive linguistics, Chinese scholars make new progress in the study of classifiers, realizing the turn from the former studies limited to rhetorical and pragmatic descriptions to the explanatory research from the perspectives of spatial meaning, metaphor, iconicity, construal and gramaticalization and so on, which attach great importance to the functions of embodied experience and human mind in the formation of classifiers. In contrast, English is a kind of non-classifier language, in which there is no special word class to express quantity among ten major word classes, but the linguists do not neglect the study of quantity. Quirk (1985) employs the name partitive construction to stand for partitve noun in his book A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, pointing out that this construction would always finish the tasks of expressing quantity with the formula "a/number+n1+of+n2". From the above discussion, we can draw a conclusion that there is a big gap between Chinese and English in the structure of quantity.Traditionally, metonymy is regarded as a mode of rhetoric, but with the development of cognitive linguistics, it has been growingly recognized as a cognitive tool. Radden & Kovesces (1999) argue that language is essentially metonymic, and Taylor (2000) believes that metonymy as a cognitive mode is far more fundamental than metaphor. In the wake of the increasingly deep research on metonymy at home and abroad, metonymy as a cognitive thinking mode is widely applied to explain the linguistic phenomena in the levels of lexicon, syntax and text with its powerful explanatory force.This thesis aims to do research on the cognitive similarities and dissimilarities in identifying and cognizing the concept of quantity in Chinese and English by means of contrasting the ways to express quantity and the nominal classifier structures in these two kinds of languages (Chinese as a classifier language while English as a non-classifier language) by dealing with the importance of metonymy in forming the structure of quantity on the basis of embodied philosophy and the philosophical thoughts of universality and relativity. This thesis shows that the formations of nominal classifier structures are closely related to man's experiences of things. Although the nominal classifier structures in Chinese and English are completely different, people in the two languages cognize quantity in the same way, and metonymy plays the same basic role in the formations of nominal classifier structures of the two languages. This study theoretically provides a new metonymic perspective for studying classifier structures in the two languages, shedding light on the theory of metonymy and the studies on linguistic typology. Practically speaking, the achievements of this study are applicable for translation and the teaching of Chinese and English as a foreign language.