An Empirical Study On English Body-related Nouns-From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

Language is an organic unity and vocabulary system is the fundamental core of the whole unity. Only with a clear analyzing of the whole unity could we better master one language. In the whole vocabulary system, body-related nouns are the most basic and fundamental ones. This is mainly attributed to that human body was being frequently used in the process of our human being's awareness and cognition to the outside world. As the Islam thinking goes, to "embodied recognize the world"-means the process people reflect on. aware of and understand the great creator by human body's structure and body's working mechanism. "Islam Guidance-embodied recognize the world" pointed out that " only if recognize human being themselves can they know every initial source of the world and understand the world thoroughly." Therefore we can see that since the ancient time, human being's understanding of the outside world were based on the self-realization. For the western "embodied cognition" theory, it stresses more on the human body dependency in the process of recognizing the outside world. Embodied cognition theory considered that the reason why human bodies are the center of cognition lies in that physical activity itself reflected the survival intension that cognition push towards. For this reason, it is very essential and necessary to re-observe the whole meaning system of human body related nouns. And also human body-related nouns have the greatest changes within the whole vocabulary meaning system, so this study takes human body related nouns as the investigation object to interpret the meaning extension of them under the perspective of cognitive linguistics.The achievements that the previous scholars have got were plentiful and substantial:most of them observed human body-related nouns form the aspects of settled collection and the cultural meaning. For the past few years, the studies that from a cognitive view to investigate body-related nouns also became abundant and not short in certain ones with a sharp perspective or depth content. Their studies definitely offer a support in the completion of this study in a large extend, but those from the cognitive view to study investigate the meaning extension of English body-related nouns even carried out an empirical teaching experiment are rarely also lack of systematic and profound analysis on it.After a long time immerse in the river of language. English human body related nouns derived so many meanings and collections from the original meanings. So here are the questions:how did those meanings evolve; what is the reason of the meaning evolution of human body-related nouns; does it feasible to analyze human body-related nouns under the framework of cognitive linguistics; if it is feasible, does this perspective could benefit the teaching practice in the class of EFL. In order to verify those questions, this study carried out an experimental study on the basis of the cognitive linguistics to interpret English body-related nouns and made a use of this investigation into EFL teaching. Both questionnaire and vocabulary test are used in the teaching process aiming for proving whether the introducing of cognitive linguistics strategy benefit the teaching practice or not.First of all, the previously studies were investigated in the study and it is found out that before the advancement of cognitive linguistic theory, the studies of English body-related nouns were mainly focused on the body-nouns collection, translation and the cultural influences on them. But since the publication of Lacoff s masterpiece Metaphors We Live By(1980). the researches of body-related nouns with a cognitive view were gradually developed. According to the cognitive describing of language and the world, human beings' cognition and conception of the world are embodiment. Hence, it is feasible to interpret body-related nouns with a cognitive view. Two body related nouns "head" and "face" are picked up here for the interpretation and analyzing of the common features in meaning extension process:our human beings make descriptions, classifications and quantifications of the outside world and the abstract emotional things throughout the corresponding location and function of human body nouns with the body part, by means of the salience and resembling thinking process, thus, the metaphorical and metonymic usage are formed and gradually shared by the same cultural members. Finally, the metaphoric and metonymic usage of body-related nouns became a part of the basic conceptual tools, and then became the new items of the whole semantic system. The analyzing result showed that because of the important role human body-related nouns played in the process of understanding the outside world, people came to know clearly about the function and location of their own body and then from the location and function of the matched body related nouns they extended their meanings by the mental process of metaphor and metonymy. They increased the new members of the meaning system of the body related nouns and also benefited the later generations' understanding to the outside world.For the purpose of testing whether this cognitive analyzing strategy benefit the EFL teaching, an empirical teaching practice was carried out. The subjects of the empirical teaching practice were from two parallel classes:class 10306 and 10307. school of computer and network Jilin Business and Technology College. The teaching practice was executed within two weeks 8 periods under the condition of not disturbing the regular schedule. Before this teaching practice was performed, one questionnaire was designed for the investigation of EFL learners; vocabulary strategy and attitude. This questionnaire was aimed at collecting the preferring strategy and attitude on learning English vocabulary of EFL learners, thereby could make a better comparison of the effect. At the same time, for observing whether cognitive linguistics analyzing strategy could benefit the learning effect of EFL learners in learning body-related nouns, three hypotheses were made before the experimental teaching practice.Hypotheses 1 the cognitive way of thinking strategy will enhance the immediate memory in the body-related nouns learning process.Hypotheses 2:the cognitive way of thinking strategy will enhance students' long-term recall in the body-related nouns learning process.Hypotheses 3:the cognitive way of thinking strategy will enhance the students' conjectural ability of the meanings of body-related nouns.In order to guarantee the preciseness of the teaching practice, before the group dividing of the subjects, one skill level test was performed to ensure that before the teaching practice was conducted, no big differences existed between the two natural classes and divided them randomly into one experiment class (EG) and one control class (CG). In the teaching practice, the EG was taught by mixed teaching method which not only consisted of traditional method like translating but also introduced into the cognitive strategy (the introducing of metaphor and metonymy as the tools for realizing the outside world and their function in the meaning extension and class convert of body-related nouns). And for the CG, the traditional teaching method was used to interpret the English body-related nouns, including translating, examples, repeating, and practicing, etc. which were not concerning with cognitive thinking strategy. After the teaching practice, two vocabulary acquisition tests for the two groups were made:one test that closely to the teaching practice was aiming at observing the short term memories of the learners and the other test was to examine the long term memories of them. At this point, to investigate the conjectural ability of the meaning of body-related nouns, most of the meanings in the teaching plan were not included in the tests.In order to enhance the credibility of this trial, one diachronic test was conducted to the EG for the aim to examine whether the cognitive thinking method into teaching practice can promote Chinese EFL learners' ability of understanding and predicting of the English polysemy words, especially for the understanding of English body-related nouns. Before the teaching practice, one language ability test was performed for the EG. the main items of the test was not only concerned with human body-related nouns but inspected the ability of divergent thinking to one familiar word and made a correct judgment. After the teaching practice, one comparative test was conducted to the EG. According to the two test results, the investigation of whether cognitive thinking method could promote the conjectural ability could be observed. And. in order to ensure the authentic and valid of the data, the process of data collecting was strictly supervised to prevent data distortion. After collecting data, SPSS 11.3 was used to analyze the statistics. According to the comparison of data analyses, the paper affirmed the basic assumptions, and proved the cognitive strategies into human body-related nouns would improve the learners' both long-term and short-term memory to the words meaning as well as the conjectural abilities in the learning process.However, few shortages were inevitable in the study, for examples, the social and cultural aspects were not concerned in the interpretation and also it is little conservative not to examine the whole English vocabulary teaching effect, etc. Only hope the result of this paper could have some inspiration and enlightenment to the later researches on the English vocabulary teaching.