A Contrastive Study Of Subcategorization Of English Stone Term And Its Chinese Counterpart

In our daily lives, stone is inseparable form the existence and development ofhuman beings. So, as the language which reflects human experience, the concept ofstone is realized by stone terms. At present, the studies of stone terms abroad mainlyfocus on mineralogy, aim at using the scientific method to name the stones, the studiesat home also mainly focus on this field, in addition there are also some studies ofstone terms about architecture, literature, ornamental stone, etc. But these studies arerelatively dispersive, lack of systematicness and theoretical framework.In this thesis, the author will compare the English and Chinese stone terms at thesubordinate level category, and explain the differences from the perspective ofcognitive linguistics and systemic functional linguistics.The author takes “stone” and“石” as the basic level category term, by the contrastive study of English stone termand its Chinese counterpart at the subordinate level, we found that the word form ofmost of the English stone terms are“free morpheme+bound morpheme(-ite)”, e.g.,achirite(透视石), in the next place is the word form “free morpheme+freemorpheme(stone)”, e.g.,almond stone. The word form of all the Chinese stone termsare “free morpheme+free morpheme(石)”. In the process of subdividing thesubordinate level members, all the Chinese stone terms use the basic level terms “石”as their headwords. Similarly, the subordinate level English stone terms use the basiclevel terms “stone” as their headwords, however this phenomenon is much lessfrequently than it is in Chinese, usually, English subordinate level stone terms use thebound morpheme “-ite” to show its part of speech. Wang Yin and some scholarsbelieves that, the basic level term may have different impacts on the word form ofsubordinate level stone terms in English and Chinese. The Chinese stone terms use the“classifier+head method”(定中构词法), that is the basic level terms are theheadwords of the subordinate level terms, the head words indicates the semanticcategorical attributes. The English stone terms use the “morphological change”(词类范畴法), the subordinate level words are expressed by inventing new words, it has nothing to with the basic level term. So, the word ending “ite” and “石” reflectsdifferent views on subcategorization. It also reflects the differences at basic levelcategory, which has some profound cultural, thinking and cognitive reason. The wordform “free morpheme+free morpheme(stone)” in English and “free morpheme+freemorpheme(石)” in Chinese reflects the common attributes in cognition of Chinesepeople and the English people. In addition, by the contrastive study above, we alsofind that the word form “free morpheme+bound morpheme(-ite)” in English are morefrequently applied in scientific field, it is less frequently used in the folk field. Theword form “free morpheme+free morpheme(stone)” are usually used in the folk fieldand seldomly used in the scientific field. This difference is due to the historical andcognitive difference reflected in language style.Because the word form “free morpheme+bound morpheme(-ite)” are moreapplied in scientific field, it is a kind of word form for terminology, and lacks ofmetaphor. However the words in folk field have more cultural connotations, so thestudy of metaphor mainly focus on the stone terms from the folk field. QinYuxiang(2003) advocated that, the pre-modifier has the function of subcategorization,by the contrastive study of pre-modifiers of English and Chinese stone terms at thesubordinate level, we can find out the differences in the subcategorization in Englishand Chinese. We believe that there exists metaphor in the pre-modifiers of Englishand Chinese stone terms, as Yang zhong, Liao Zhenggang(2003) advocated, thephenomenon of semantic transfer (exactly attribute transfer) exists in thepre-modifiers of some non-basic color terms like “玫瑰红”, also, the syntacticalfunction of “玫瑰” changes. There also exists attributes transfer and the change ofpragmatic function in English and Chinese stone terms like “孔雀石”（peacock stone).By the survey and statics analysis, we find that the top four frequently used vehicleare the same, they are from the animal field, plant field, tool field and human organfield. But the frequency of attribute transfer of the top four domains in Chinese arehigher than it is in English. Because grammatical transfer occurs in the nouns in thepre-modifiers, despite the source domain, they are all considered as the transferenceof function form noun to adjective, by statistical analysis, the rates of grammatical transfer are higher in Chinese than it is in English.