A Schematic Study Of The Meaning Of Animal Words In Chinese And English

According to Guo Zhuzhang, a famous Chinese linguist, animal words are words indicating animals and expressions or phrases containing those words. (Guo Zhuzhang 2000). This thesis will adopt his definition for animal words.Animals are one of the most accessible species to human in our perceiving of the outside world. What's more, animals are the closest species to man so far as their natural attributes concerned. Animal words are first used to refer to the animals in nature. They can be found easily in people's daily remarks and literal works. Traditional linguists in China have paid their attention to this kind of words in their research, and their studies are of great importance to our linguistic and biologic study in modern times. In fact, animal words take up a big proportion of the total in both Chinese and English. Therefore, the study of animal words could be a meaningful subject.Up until now, many scholars and researchers have done a lot of work on animal words. Most of their studies are about the cultural meanings of these words. These scholars have been trying to study the formation of the meanings by way of discussing their cultural connotations, so as to find the reasons for the differences in meaning of those words in Chinese and English. Recently, a few scholars have been trying to study and analyze them in a cognitive approach. They have adopted the metaphor theory, conceptual framework theory, and the relevance theory, etc. It is easy to accept the idea that the formation of the meanings of animal words is influenced by the culture of the language. However, it is not so easy to explain the formation of the meanings of animal words in a cognitive approach. Metaphor theory, conceptual framework theory are quite useful and meaningful in explaining the problem, while they are too abstract for common learners to understand. To understand conceptual metaphor, we have to, first of all, figure out what the cognitive basis of the conceptual metaphor is?To solve this problem, we will adopt the image schema theory. Image schema is the basic cognitive model of human perception. We are going to figure out the cognitive mechanism for the formation and extension of the meanings of animal words by the use of image schema theory. This thesis will take "shu" and "mouse" as examples. First of all, we will categorize the meanings of these two words and then analyse the meanings in a schematic approach, so as to find out the cognitive basis for them. Based on the above research, we'll try to work out a cognitive mechanism for animal words meaning formation and extension. Our study aims to prove that the formation and extension of words are based on human cognition, and human cognition is based on human embodied experience, and all these happen in accordance with certain cognitive mechanism.Image schema has been used to explain the meanings of prepositions, but it has seldom been used to explain other categories of words. This thesis will offer a new way for the study of words, and a new case of application of the image schema theory. Image schema will provide an intuitive explanation of word meaning and offer a further understanding of the formation of word meanings.Through our comparative study of the words about "shu" and "mouse", under the guidance of the qualitative method and qualitative method, we have found that the formation and extension of word meaning are based on human cognition, and human cognition is based on human embodied experience. Based on different embodied experience of a certain object, people from the two languages may form different meanings of the same object; however, the mechanism behind this is almost the same.