A Comparative Study Of Titles In Chinese And English From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

Titles, which manifests relationships between individuals, occupies a place of its own in lexicon with its old age and high-frequency of use. From the synchronic point of view, it crisscrosses with other levels of linguistics, such as grammar, morphology, semantics, and so on. The study of titles also connects with the field of sociology, culture study, philosophy, historiography, aesthetics, etc. While in the diachronic point of view, titles has its own history of changes, the trace of which helps present a clearer drawing of the development track of language, society and civilization along history. Therefore, a contrastive study of titles in Chinese and English languages is conducted in this article from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, in the hope that it can be of some significance to the practices of teaching and using the Chinese titles.Cognitive linguistics, though a newly developed approach, has so far been adopted to solve the problems on different linguistic levels. This article is devoted to explore the relationship between cognition and titles, as there are relationships between cognition and linguistic phenomena, direct or indirect. The concepts I choose to use in the study include: image schema, iconicity, metaphor, etc.With regard to cognition, Chinese people put their emphasis on the interdependence and unification of duality. They tend to unify between human and nature, human and divinity, spirit and material, subject and object; hence, their liability for generality. They are more dependent upon intuition and sensibility to learn about things, and are more inclined to copy the already existing objects. Western people, on the other hand, put their emphasis on the co-existence and contradictoriness of duality. They tend to learn about things for their specialties with senses, and are more inclined to develop their abstract thinking and analytical abilities. All this may be where lie the effects of cognition upon the use of titles. I will in the article illustrate the points with the contrastive study of kinship titles, non-kinship social titles and names in Chinese and English.No one can or manages to deny the fact that all linguistic phenomena are not solely to be explained by cognitive linguistics approach. To do so will drown us in the wallow of mentalism. Therefore, what is presented in this article are only some potential reasons that may lead to the differences between Chinese and English use of titles. The resulted viewpoints in this article may later be testified, right or wrong, by...