A Cognitive Study On Meaning Transference Of Body-Part Terms

Generally speaking, human beings conduct their cognitive activities in accordance with the following rule:getting to know the world in the sequence from the near to the distant, from the simple to the complex, from the familiar to the unknown, and from the concrete to the abstract. As the human body is man's most familiar part with the closest relationship attached, it tends to be vulnerable to man's perception and understanding, and thus become the most explicit, impressive, and immediate part in man's life, labor and communication. It is due to motivations of economy and informativeness that man is most likely to start from his own body to cognize the world, regarding the body parts and organs as the experiential basis for him to know, experience and perceive the whole world. Only with the bodily experiences varying from perceptual, motional, physical, and social to cultural experiences, can man afford to construct the basic categories and concepts of cognizing the world. As human body parts and organs are the physiological foundation and the most fundamental reference point of man's cognition, it goes without saying that their bodily experiences are targeted as the basic research tool and instrument for man's mind and cognition, as a widely-recognized hot topic in the current field of cognitive linguistics, providing proof for the experiential philosophical outlook, and endowed with solid scientific and philosophical foundation.In the course of cognizing the world, man mainly applies two cognitive instruments:metaphor and metonymy, both motivated by experiences and incorporated into the semantic construction. Among the current studies on metaphor and metonymy both at home and abroad, the cognitive study into human body-part terms is in full swing, featuring multi-dimension, full-scale and cross-discipline. It mainly covers four aspects:overwhelmingly applying theories of conceptual metaphor (scarcely conceptual metonymy) to one certain body part (or a few body parts); conducting English and Chinese comparative studies on one certain body part (or a few body parts) from the angle of metaphor at the micro or macro level; applying image schema, space blending and other cognitive linguistics theories to comprehensively and systematically study human metaphor; and approaching human body parts from the cultural perspective to unveil the cultural connotations underlying those human body-part terms.The current domestic cognitive studies on English and Chinese body-part terms, achieving remarkable abundance, diversity and popularity, not only promotes development of the metaphor and metonymy theories in full depth, but also accelerates the comparative studies between Chinese and English. Nevertheless, this filed still lacks the systematic and comprehensive cognitive and comparative studies aided by corpus. Some prominent weak points of the current studies are listed as follows:the current studies seem quite monotonous and stereotyped in the approach to exploration of cognitive universality, which largely depends on boring classification and rash induction, substantially devoid of innovation; the current studies are generally plagued by one prevalent problem that studies on metonymy are overwhelmingly overshadowed by those on metaphor by incorporating metonymy into the domain of metaphor, or blurring the boundary of metaphor and metonymy, accompanied by the problem that the current classification of human metaphor and metonymy appears fairly ambiguous or disordered without being governed by one unified standard; the current cognitive studies on human body-part items remain challenged in the incomplete coverage of the study objects for most emphasis has been paid to a few main body parts while many other body parts have drawn little or no attention, such as "ear, neck, arm, brow" and "viscera" except "heart". Furthermore, the current cognitive analysis on the body-part terms is not systematic, with insufficient attention to differences in their cognitive salience and to their association, accordingly reserving room for comprehensive and systematic cognitive studies; the current studies mostly highlight description and categorization of human body-part terms while cares little about the specific operational mechanism, that is to say, unable to systematically explain how meanings of human body-part terms are metaphorized or metonymized.This dissertation is a systematic in-depth and all-around comparative study on English and Chinese body-part terms from the cognitive perspective. By combining cognitive linguistic theories, including mapping, image schema and ICM, and the continuum concept of metaphor and metonymy, it constructs unified and continuous cognitive network of each English and Chinese body-part term through analysis on its meaning transference, exploring the differences in English and Chinese meaning transference from the angles of language, culture, natural environment, etc; then the dissertation conducts a quantitative and qualitative analysis on meaning transference and semantic image exaction by taking a statistic approach to different body-part terms in order to explore the experiential rule and difference in cognitive salience of body parts in English and Chinese; finally, the dissertation collects the semantic metaphorical and metonymical conceptual properties of the English and Chinese body-part terms for macro comparative studies, to probe into the differences of meaning transference from the cross-cultural perspective, and to represent cognitive universality and cultural relativity of English and Chinese nations at an all-around level and dimension. In order to smoothly achieve those goals, this dissertation will select corpus from authoritative, authentic, reliable and stable dictionaries instead of literary and other sources, covering a wide variety of expressions from words, phrases and idioms related to body parts, because routinized and conventionalized metaphoric and metonymic expressions best embody the most alive and most deeply entrenched, efficient and powerful cognition.In the course of constructing English and Chinese meaning transference systems of body-part terms, the dissertation systematically reveals the following holistic traits:1. English tends to borrow the concept of containment to activate interaction between metaphor and metonymy, while Chinese is relatively weak in application of containment.2. Transference of body-part terms from noun to quantifier in Chinese is more prevalent than that in English.3. Quite a number of English body-part terms can be metonymized into verbs by themselves while the Chinese equivalents fail to do so but mostly to be combined with action morphemes to form the compound verb structure——"action+body-part terms" or "body-part terms+action". Accordingly, shift of body-part terms from noun to verb in English is more frequent and prevalent than that in Chinese.4. In Chinese a body-part term with different appellations features a high amount of meaning transference, caused by historically excessive meaning loads of one word and assignation part of meaning loads to another word. Consequently those appellations have certain division in role, with semantic image exaction of one appellation highlighting physical features, tending to become a quantifier.5. The quantities of meaning transference of body-part terms decrease successively from terms of the head to terms of the trunk, and then to those of the viscera. The head terms feature the highest salience with striking appearance, prominent location and indispensible function, in which the function features a higher salience in the English nation while the appearance and location feature a higher salience in the Chinese nation; the quantities of meaning transference of head terms are very close to those of trunk terms in English, while the gap between the two in Chinese is relatively high, which can be explained by the emphasis in semantic image exaction; because the viscera are covert, invisible, and too complicated in function, more difficult to perceive than more overt parts of the head and the trunk, thus they feature the lowest salience, with meanings mostly transferred to character and emotion. 6. Different body parts feature distinct cognitive salience in both Chinese and English. Location, whose amount basically conforms to that of the meaning transference, is the most representative measure of salience among the head parts; while function also plays a supporting role in measurement of salience. In both Chinese and English, "tou/head" is the most salient part, integrating "bounded", "good gestalt", "more", "functional" and "interactional" salient features; Likewise, "yan/eye" and "bi/nose", though smaller in shape, are also highly salient and prone to becoming the "profile", with "bounded", "immediate", "functional" and "interactional" salient features; the above-mentioned three parts are located high, while "lian/face" and "zui/mouth" located relatively lower are fairly salient, with "good gestalt", "functional" and "interactional" salient features; in spite of considerably strong "functional" and "interactional" features, "er/ear" is poorly salient, for being inconspicuously located, "less" in shape, "non-immediate" in perception; largely incorporated into the gestalt perception of the mouth organ, "ya/tooth", "she/tongue" and "chun/lip" feature a quite low salience with a poorer gestalt than "mouth"; though located high, "mei/brow" is poorly salient with weak "functional" and "interactional" salient features. In contrast, "lian" and "mei" in Chinese, with profound cultural loads and "stereotyped" images, situated in the "center" of Chinese culture, both feature a higher salience than English equivalents of "face" and "brow";Function, whose amount basically conforms to that of the meaning transference, is the most representative measure of salience among the trunk parts; while location also plays a supporting role in measurement of salience. Among the trunk parts, "shou/hand", "bei/back" and "jiao/foot" with meaning transference based on location, which feature the higher number of semantic image exaction based on function, are the more salient parts. Among the three parts, "shou/hand" is the most salient part, integrating "bounded", "immediate", "functional" and "interactional" salient features, followed by "bei/back" with salient features of "good gestalt", "more" and "jiao/foot" with strong "functional" and "interactional" salient features; "bi/arm" and "jing/neck" which fail to transfer meanings based on location, and have few semantic image exaction based on function, are poorly salient. On the other hand, "jiao" in Chinese and "back" in English feature a higher salience than the respective equivalent of "foot" and "bei" for its profound culture load and "stereotyped" image.Function, whose amount is parallel to that of the meaning transference, is the most representative measure of salience among the viscera parts. In Chinese, "xin" is the most salient part, followed by "chang" and "dan", and other parts poorly salient; in English, "heart" is the most salient, followed by "gut", and other parts poorly salient. "dan" in Chinese features a higher salience than its English equivalent of "gall" for its profound culture load and "stereotyped" image.7. The semantic metaphorical property of body-part terms in English and Chinese embodies metaphors mapped from body parts to "inanimate objects, space, time and container"; while the semantic metonymical property of body-part terms manifests itself in extension of the nominatum of body-part terms to "man, emotion, product and perception".