A Contrastive Study Of Lexical Motivation Between Chinese And English From Cultural Perspective

Motivation refers to the natural link between a linguistic form and the thing it designates, or signifier and signified. In the past, due to the impact of Saussure's principle of arbitrariness, studies on language motivation have not been given sufficient attention. Recently, the emergence of cognitive linguistics and contrastive linguistics provides a theoretic support for studying the motivated nature of language from a new angle.However, most of recent studies on linguistic motivation are limited within the author's mother language or one certain language. Nowadays, the rise of contrastive linguistics makes it possible for us to investigate on motivation among different languages.In this thesis, Contrastive Analysis (CA) is adopted to describe the differences and similarities of lexical motivation between Chinese and English. Both diachronic and synchronic study is employed. Through a deeper contrastive study in terms of phonetic, graphemic, morphological, and semantic, a conclusion is achieved that many similarities are performed on the motivations of primary onomatopoeia and semantic level both in English and in Chinese, which reflects that there exists a similar cognition mode between eastern and western people. Whereas, at levels of graphemic and morphological, more differences on the lexical motivation are shown between Chinese and English. On the whole, motivated words are universal both in English and in Chinese, but the arbitrary nature in English vocabulary is more obvious, and the motivated feature is more significant in ideographic system like Chinese.The different lexical motivations between Chinese and English lie in the two different language families they come from, expanding and developing under the nurture of different philosophical thoughts. The motivated nature of Chinese words is generated and developed on the basis of the image thought of Chinese people for thousands of years, but the arbitrary nature of English words is produced under the influence of peculiar abstract thinking of the western people.