Cognitive Semantic Analysis Of "Shou" In Chinese

People interact with themselves,people and different things in the world all the time.Therefore,the concepts,categories,reasons and thoughts which are formed in our mind are closely related to our body experience.We are able to observe objective world with our own bodies and establish some concepts,the process of which is called conceptualization.Conceptualization is a mental process.Metaphor and metonymy belong to conceptualization,which has a close relationship with our thinking.Hands are important and indispensable parts of our body,which have a lot of functions.Since we use our hands to do things every day,hands are in great relevance to our daily life.Thus,shou are extended in meaning with the passage of time.Many researchers paid attention to the metaphorical analysis of shou,but most of them made contrastive studies between hand in English and shou in Chinese,and few of them concerned the analysis of shou in Chinese on the basis of corpus.Therefore,this thesis,based on the corpus taken from the Center for Chinese Linguistics,aims at the semantic analysis of shou in Chinese from the cognitive metaphorical and metonymical perspectives.Some conclusions are drawn as follows.(1)The meaning extension of shou,i.e.,the formation of the metaphorical and metonymic concepts are based on the basic concepts of shou which were obtained by people's interactions with themselves and the outside world.(2)The metaphorical concept MEANS IS SHOU takes up to 34.9% with the highest frequency in the metaphorical concepts,which is extended from the basic concept SHOU CAN DO THINGS,indicating that the meaning extension of shou is closely connected with and mostly controlled by this basic concept.(3)In the combination of shou with different grammatical categories,“verb+shou” has the most metaphorical concepts,concerning STOP DOING SOMETHING IS SHOU,START DOING THINGS IS SHOU,ASSISTANCE IS SHOU,PARTICIPATION IS SHOU,and SOMETHING EASY IS SHOU,which shows that the combination of the verbs and shou can bring more extended meanings easily.But “shou+noun” is the highest in frequency with 1314 tokens(43.8%),indicating that the combination of shou with the noun is more universal in everyday life.(4)In the meaning extension of shou,there are more metaphorical than metonymical concepts used,i.e.,there are thirteen metaphorical concepts and two metonymical concepts.The result shows that the metaphorical thinking model plays a more important role in the meaning extension of shou.Due to the limited personal concentration,the deficiency of the numbers of corpus should be improved in the future study.I hope this research will do some contribution to the further studies in this field.