A Comparative Study Of Hantai Human Body Nouns

Human beings are used to analogizing their own cognition to other things,measuring them according to their own standards and using the simple body-part terms to nominate,summarize and describe the unintelligible abstractions.Although human cognition is universal,it is still influenced by their different cultural backgrounds,which makes us think of different concepts and associations when using the metaphors of the human organ nouns.Most of the extended meanings of the human organ nouns are created based on “metaphor” and “metonymy”.This thesis has made a comparison mainly on the four parts of human organ nouns,namely head,body,limbs and internal organs.First of all,according to the definition of human organ nouns in The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary and The Royal Society Dictionary,the author analyzes the nouns’ semantic features and then concludes the universality and individuality of the metaphorical meanings and metonymic meanings of Chinese and Thai human organ nouns.Though the dictionary definition has explained its meaning,it still cannot distinguish the meanings of human body nouns in Chinese and Thai language.Therefore,we need to adopt the metaphor theory to divide the extended meaning of Chinese and Thai human organ nouns into metaphorical meaning and metonymical meaning.Through the metaphorical image points,the nouns are classified into position class,shape class and function class.According to the relationship between tenor and vehicle,the nouns can be grouped into part-whole,organ-function/characteristic and organ-action/behavior.Then,the semantic features are analyzed to reveal the differences of human organ nouns between Chinese and Thai.Finally,the author explains it in culture,way of thinking and other aspects.According to the research finding,the shape metaphor and the position metaphor of most Chinese and Thai human body nouns are similar because the shape and location of human organs are the same.However,there exist differences in function metaphor of two languages,which reflects the differences in culture and way of thinking between China and Thailand.Therefore,cultural connotation,way of thinking and moral concept can be revealed through semantic componential analysis.