The Meaning Evolvement Of The Vocabulary On "Head"

In our Chinese Teaching practice, we found that, comparing with the abstract words, it is much easier for foreign students to master the visual, picturesque words. It also takes much time and energy to understand and memorize a word only from the explanation in textbooks and dictionaries, for the explanations given to one word are superficial and have little relation with each other.The vocabulary on"head"is one of the most important categories of the vocabulary on human body, which is an indispensable branch of Chinese vocabulary. On the basis of the lingual data on the subject, this thesis presents a road map of the development of the word meaning evolvement on the vocabulary of"head"as well as clarifying the reason behind it through the following there approaches:According to the two major ways of word meaning evolvement——metaphor and metonymy, this thesis makes a classification of the contemporary vocabulary on"head"and reveals the connection between each word's original meaning and its current meaning. According to the visualization theory, a key factor to motivate word meaning evolvement, this thesis researches on the"head"idioms and found that the post-evolvement meaning unifies all the meaning units as a whole rather than simply adding them.Instead of recognizing the vocabulary on human organs as Body language, we redefine the body language as language units which describe body postures and yet exclude the vocabulary on human organs.