On The Rhetoric Word-formation And Figure Of Speech Of Names Of Dishs

From the linguistic perspective, the name of a dish is a kind of society discourse. As for the food industry, various kinds of names of dishes are like the 'eyes' of the food, which should be shining and attractive. A specific name of a dish is a case in isolation; whereas being put together, they constitute the 'name cards' of the food industry in modern cities. They attack the customers in a direct way and also reflect the features of modern food culture in a direct way. Thus, the name of the dish is a fresh linguistic phenomenon in the context of Chinese culture. But probably owing to the constraint of the old saying—'A gentleman keeps his hands off the kitchen', there are rarely researches done on the linguistic development of food industry. From 1990's, though the interests in the researches on sociolinguistics have been greatly increasing and the striking results have been achieved, the comprehensive and systematic researches in this area still need further endeavor.The present study takes thousands of names of Chinese dishes as basic corpus (because of time limitation, we focus on peculiar names), and attempts to analyze the rules of phonetic refinement, diction and figure of speech by referring to various kinds of books and extensively enumerating examples. It is hoped that, the present study, in its modest way, helps to reveal these rhetoric rule and make Chinese names of dishes develop in the positive rhetoric course to reinforce its intrinsic cultural elegant taste.This thesis is composed of five parts. In introduction, we discuss the necessity of researches on the rhetoric of the name of the dish. Chapter one explores its phonetic rules. Chapter two generalizes the features of naming in terms of diction. Chapter three analyzes the different patterns of figure of speech. Chapter four clarifies the importance of analyzing the rhetoric of the name of the dish, and presents the author's opinion of naming.