Contrastive Analysis Of Suan And Sour:a Cognitive Inquiry

Taste is one of the most basic and important senses of human beings in perceiving theworld, the researches on which are the part of research of cognitive abilities of human beings.The literature review shows that western scholars mainly study the mapping of taste wordsfrom the perspective of metaphor while Chinese scholars mainly study from the perspectivesof grammar, metaphor and cognition, semantic and culture. However, so far, the studiesexclusively related to suan and sour are scarce. The present study collects data of suan andsour from various sources, and within the theoretical framework of metaphor and metonymytheories of Cognitive Linguistics, analyzes the prototypical senses of suan and sour and theirextended meanings, and traces the semantic development of the two words so as to constructthe semantic network of prototypical senses and extended meanings of suan and sour.The data mainly come from authoritative dictionaries and corpus. The Chinese data comefrom 《现代汉语词典》、《当代汉语字典》、《在线汉语字典》、《在线中华字典》、《在线康熙字典》and the Modern Chinese Section of CCL(Center of Chinese Language). TheEnglish data come from Oxford Advanced Learners English-Chinese Dictionary, LongmanAdvanced American Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, OxfordEnglish Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary, Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary,Merriam-Webster Learners’ Dictionary, Online Etymology Dictionary and BNC (BritishNational Corpus).Based on the data and with the help of the method of Principled Polysemy Analysis, thethesis describes the similarities and differences between suan and sour in the process of thesemantic development in the aim of exploring the similarities and differences in semanticextensions and expressions of suan in Chinese and sour in English and explaining theexquisite differences embodied in the two languages affected by these English and Chinesecultures. The thesis discusses the influence of cultures upon the differences in semanticextensions between suan and sour from the angles of thinking mode, traditional culture, historical development and natural environment. The results show that similarities betweenthe cultures of suan in Chinese and sour in English can be attributed to the common humanexperiences, and that differences occur where thinking mode affects the sematic networks,Buddhism and the imperial examination system affect Chinese unique expressions of suan,historical development stimulates unique expressions in Chinese and English, and naturalenvironment of British affects the extended meanings of sour.