A Study On Language Decategorization Of Chinese And English Based On Frame Semantics

As the product in the process of cognition, language embodies the conceptualstructures based on human being’s perception, understanding and beliefs towards theobjective world. From the perspective of Frame Semantics, one’s language ability and theindividual cognitive construction as the background knowledge are inseparable. No matterthe language unit is a word or a text, each of them ought to be connected to the cognitiveframe which differs in complexity. Before fully understanding the meaning of language, wehave to confirm and realize the framework with a provided conceptual foundation, and tostudy how the conceptual content obtains the linguistic representation.Originally used in psychology, frame was introduced into cognitive linguistics, and inaddition, it supplied people a brand new cognitive interpretation to language study. Themeaning of language mainly relies on the cognitive frame, and the expression of languageis the trigger to activate the cognitive frame. Conceptual frame is a dynamic system, whoseelements could be changed by different human experience, cognitive targets and culturalbackground. Taking the Chinese and English words and idiom expressions in real life forexample, it is found that: the general conceptual frame and meanings of most languageexpressions are without discrepancy, but after language decategorization, people’s cognitiontowards such decategorized Chinese and English expressions start to be different whilemeanings are shifting, and the main reason is the difference in the subjective and objectiveethical culture of Chinese and English.In the view of frame semantics, understanding the matched frame is significant beforemastering any meaning of one concept in the conceptual system. Understanding language isjust the process of matching the content with known frames. Based on frame semantics, thisthesis is going to study the formation and motivation of Chinese and English linguisticdecategorization, to contrastively study the meaning shift and people’s understanding ofsuch decategorized expressions. Then this thesis arrive at the conclusion that people’scognitive understanding after decategorization is conditioned by human experience andcultural background frame.