A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Plant Words

Just as plants are a vitally crucial part of human life, so plant words andexpressions are inherently a building block of human languages. They are not onlyused to refer to the physical trees, flowers and grass, but have grown throughmetaphor and other mechanisms to be highly polysemous and versatile andmeanwhile have taken on rather rich connotations. The semantic extension of plantwords is to a great extent a reflection of the social, cultural, and cognitive models ofparticular languages, and thus an important key to reveal them.This study carries out a careful examination of plant words in noun phrases,idioms, proverbs, classical sentences and poems, including common names andmulti-meaning terms or phrases. Based on the theories of cognitive linguistics,cultural semantics and pragmatics, and with considerations of the plant taxonomy,this study makes a thorough analysis of a large quantity of relevant linguistic datataken from English and Chinese authoritative dictionaries and corpora, from suchperspectives as conceptual metaphor, categorization, prototype and interactiveexperience, and encyclopedic knowledge. By means of the investigation of themotivation of plant names and the semantic evolution of plant words, and acomparison of English and Chinese plant words in their cognitive models, culturalconnotations and pragmatic implications, on both global and local levels, the authorendeavors to offer a coherent, systemic explanation for the semantic development ofplant words in the two languages, the cognitive characteristics of plant metaphors,and the divergences as well as parallels between English and Chinese plant words.The methodology of this study combines interpretative and descriptive approaches,and integrates cognitive and cultural paradigms, together with the inductive anddeductive modes of reasoning. Besides, due to the empirical nature of the study,statistical analysis is heavily drawn on as a chief method of research.Starting with the folk names of plants, the study analyzes the cognitive, culturaland pragmatic features of linguistic expressions with plant words or words denoting plant parts, with special focus on their etymology, metaphor mappings, grammaticaland morphological features, and compositional features, for the purpose of revealingthe multi-dimensional cognitive process of meaning extension of plant words: naturalobjects（arbitrarily naming）—analogical mapping—addition and compounding—folkderivation. The description of the linguistic manifestations and cultural significancesof fundamental English and Chinese plant words and expressions is promising to offera new reference for a comprehensive and systematic comparative study of the twolanguages in their specific as well as common ways of conceptualization.This study compares and interprets plant words and expressions in the twolanguages both through and across their semantic development. The former approachdeals with meaning generations, conceptual mappings, meaning extension, semanticevolution, morphological composition, cultural connotations and pragmaticperformances of plant words, while the latter involves comparisons and contrastsbetween the two languages in each of these aspects. Following the cognitive view ofmeaning, this study advocates that plant words and expressions are the product ofhuman cognitive activities and interactions with plants, that their meanings are thusembodied, that meaning extensions of plant names are based on their metaphoricalmappings and, therefore, are conceptual and metaphorical in nature.Through analyses and comparisons, the author observes that the folk names ofplants are motivated by the human conceptual system and many of them bear acertain degree of iconicity, which is not relevant to the plant taxonomy. Thepolysemy of plant words results from the interaction between human metaphoricalthought and the objective world and the ways of conceptualization tend to radiate.The motivation of lexical meaning, metaphorical meaning and cultural meaning isdemonstrated through a process of sensual perception, mental cognition and culturalcognition. The metaphorical cognitive path is from the pure botanical pant words tomulti-meaning words. Common plant words have a very strong capacity forcollocation and a wide range of pragmatics, but English and Chinese diverge in theirflexibility of collocation and grammatical performances. The cross-linguisticdifferences can be attributed to geographical environments and national cultures. A cross-linguistic study of plant words and expressions, focused on theirmotivations, metaphorical structures, etymologies, morphologies, semantic andpragmatic performances, and folk knowledge systems, is not only significant forrevealing the distinct ways of conceptualization by the English and Chinese peoplesrespectively, but also helpful for appreciating the cultural connotations underlyingthe plant words and expressions, and in this sense, has practical applications inEnglish teaching and learning, the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language,cross-cultural communication, and linguistic studies.