A Corpus-based Cognitive Approach To "Chi" In Chinese And "Eat" In English

"chi" in Chinese and "eat" in English are two typical words expressing the prime need of human beings to take food for existence. In the previous studies of "chi" and "eat", some scholars emphasize cultural impact on the semantic development of "chi" in Chinese; others are interested in the phenomenon that "chi" and "eat" can be followed with various objects in the verb+object construction, and try to tell why the two words have various objects. However, there are few scholars having realized that "chi" and "eat" have their own semantic categories. Most scholars make a contrastive study of "chi" and "eat" to reveal their differences in Chinese and English; they ignore the common cognitive features of "chi" and "eat", which are presented when people classify the semantic categories of "chi" and "eat".With idealized cognitive models (ICM for short) as the theoretical foundation and corpus statistics, the thesis deals with the construction and expansion of semantic categories of "chi" and "eat". First, the thesis puts forward a hypothesis of the ICM structure of "chi" and "eat", which should coincide with people's intuitive and idealized concept about the behavior of eating. We have summarized five elements in the ICM of "chi" and "eat": intention, agent, patient, location and tool. The intention to feed the body and get nourishment motivates the action of eating. Only animate creatures have desire to feed the body, so they are natural agents. To complete the action, there must be something edible, i.e. food, serving as a patient. Meanwhile, the action must be done in some location, and usually tools can be used as an assistance to finish eating, so location and tool are also two elements in the ICM. We argue that the ICM is the source of the prototype in the semantic categories of "chi" and "eat". Then in Chapter Three, the thesis testifies the reliability of the hypothesis with the evidence from corpus statistics.Research results indicate that the semantic categories of "chi" and "eat" are based on the ICM. Between the members in the category, the one fitting all the elements in the ICM is the prototype of the category, while other non-typical members are still closely related to the prototype, because they derive from the prototype by changing or losing a few elements in the ICM. At the same time, the semantic categories of "chi" and "eat" achieve the expansion from the prototype. The expansion needs the metaphorical and metonymic mappings, which are two of the structuring principles of the ICM, serving as the cognitive mechanisms.Through a contrastive study of the semantic categories of "chi" and "eat", we find that the ICM of "chi" and "eat" is the same, which shows that the features of the prototypes in the two semantic categories are the same. Furthermore, the semantic categories of "chi" and "eat" show many common features in their extension in that the types of metaphorical and metonymic mappings of "chi" and "eat" are almost the same. However, because of the unequal cognitive significance of "chi" in Chinese and "eat" in English, the inherent divergence in the two languages and the restriction from the different cultural models, "chi" and "eat" perform differently in their language expressions. But generally speaking, the way people conceptualize and categorize "chi" and "eat" tends to be identical, so in the construction of meaning, commonality is dominant between "chi" in Chinese and "eat" in English.