Imagery, Culture And Translation--A Comparative Study On The English Versions Of Tang Poetry Through Cultural Linguistics

In his book Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics(1996),Gary Palmer applied cognitive linguistics directly to three traditional approaches that are central to linguistic anthropology:Boasian linguistics.ethnosemantics,and the ethnography of speaking,and he named this synthesis cultural linguistics.Palmer proposed cultural linguistics as a new approach towards the way language works.The most distinguished feature.Of this approach is that it lays emphasis on imagery again.Imagery refers not only to visual images,but also images we get from all our perceptual organs.It is a complexcognitive item,which includes specific images as well as other relevant but more dbs仃act cognitive concepts such as schema and script,etC.. Cultural linguistics,by its very essence,is a theory of mental imagery.It seeks to understand how speakers deploy speech and listeners understand it through kinds of imagery.It takes that language is the play of verbal Lymbols that are based in imagery which is virtually structured by culture.Imagery,language,culture and their relations form the core of cultural linguistics. The fact that poetry is creative of images and the notable differences between Chinese and English culture add great significance to the comparative study of the imagery.of Tang poetry and its English versions.This dissertation makes a tentative research on the application of cultural linguistics to the comparative study of Tang poetry and its English versions,hoping it will be constructive on the translation of Tang poetry and the appreciation of its English versions.