A Study Of Chinese Sensory-evaluative Words From The Perspective Of Embodied Cognition

Evaluation research is a hot topic in philosophy,linguistics and other fields.Most linguistic studies were based on appraisal theory or local grammar of evaluation,most of which concentrated on the evaluative meaning and had done little on word system.This study takes Chinese sensory-evaluative words as the object,starting from the perspective of embodied cognition with embodied-cognitive principle as the guidance and embodied cognitive theories as specific methods.This study first studies the distributions of sensory modalities and emotion types involved by sensory-evaluative words,on the basis of which we study the corresponding distribution of sensory modality types and emotion types.Then the difference of emotion categories triggered by different sensory contents and the relation between emotion and evaluative meaning are analyzed.Finally,the generation modes of evaluative meaning are summarized.Based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of sensory-evaluative words,the findings are as follows:1)For sensory modalities,sensory-evaluative words can be divided into 9categories.Listing from the most to the least,these modalities are: vision,touch,pain sense,temperature sense,audition,balance sense,time sense,taste and smell.2)For emotion types,sensory-evaluative words can be divided into 8 categories.Listing from the most to the least,these categories are acceptance,disgust,anger,sadness,joy,fear,shame and calm.3)The positive and negative tendencies of emotions are completely consistent with corresponding evaluative meanings.Positive emotions correspond to positive evaluation,and negative emotions correspond to negative evaluation.4)Different sensory modalities play their own particular role in perceiving different exteroceptive stimuli respectively,and different stimuli have different direct effects on evaluative meaning.Besides exteroceptive stimuli,word-formation processes,cultural allusions,life experiences and other factor can also effect the evaluative meaning.5)Combining the framework of reality-emotion-evaluation and the influences different perceptive contents have on emotions and evaluative meanings,two generation modes of evaluative meaning are summarized: intuitive mode and encyclopedia effected mode.The sources of intuition can fall into two categories: biological intuition and cultural-specific intuition.Biological intuition is the common intuitive response of humans and cultural-specific intuition is specific emotional and evaluative responses unique to a specific cultural community.Evaluative meaning of words in encyclopedia effected mode are determined,of course,by encyclopedia knowledge and exteroceptive stimuli and interoceptive embodied perception are the ways to activate and connect with corresponding encyclopedia knowledge.This study investigates the relationship between reality,emotion and evaluative language as well as the generation modes of evaluative meaning.Our findings can provide implications for the conclusions drawn on embodied cognitive experiments from the perspective of language system,providing references for future research on evaluative language,especially evaluative words.