A Study On Animal Word Concept Frames In English And Chinese

Animals and human are evolutionary products of nature. In the long evolutionary process, the development and survival of human are closely related to animals. Since animals in human's society occupy such an important position, language, as a reflector of experience, would have profound understanding and cognition of animal words, which will enrich animal word meanings. Most of the previous studies on animal words in English and Chinese are just setting on describing linguistic phenomena rather than explaining underlying cognitive mechanisms. Systematic and comprehensive explanations of the motivations are still far from touched.This thesis, from the perspective of Frame Semantics, simulates a general concept frame shared by all animal words in English and Chinese through the collecting and analyzing all the animal words from《英汉大词典》and《汉语大词典》. The general concept frame is open-end, that is, the number and the contents of concepts in it will become unceasingly rich along with human's nonstop understanding towards animals. It has great significance in exploring the characteristics of animal word concept frames, the relationship between concepts, meanings and formal representations, the motivations for naming subcategory animal members, the mechanisms, methods and principles for animal word meaning change and shift.This thesis argues that the meanings of animal words are closely related to their concept frames. Each animal word represents a conceptual category, and to understand the animal word will inevitably evoke the whole concept frame. Any concept in a frame has its own content (the description of a concept's content is called concept description) and embodies a certain meaning, but not all the concepts could be lexicalized through concept description. Through a case study of PARROT frame, this thesis could notice the conceptualization and lexicalization similarities and differences in English and Chinese. The identical brain structure and body structure constitute the foundation of common perception for English and Chinese people. However, different lexicalized words still exist, for different concepts in a frame have been profiled through different perspectives due to different cognitive subjects. To understand unreal animal words which generally have higher cultural dominance need to draw support from other animals' concept frames and inject cultural presupposition.Based on the general concept frame, this thesis investigates the motivation for naming subcategory animal members, that is, to profile one of the concepts in an animal concept frame and then lexicalized it. People in a certain culture could subconsciously distinguish the profiled concept through the formal representation of the subcategory member. This thesis also finds that any concept in general concept frame has a potential to be profiled and then becomes the motivation for naming.As for animal word meaning change and shift, this thesis explores the meaning change mechanism—concept shifting types in the general concept frame. In English and Chinese, the direction of concept shifting is influenced by perception and affect which will finally result in different formal representations. Under a specific cultural environment, the conceptual meaning of an animal word may be backgrounded and non-conceptual meanings may be foregrounded. This kind of situation will lead to cultural meanings and enrich the connotation of that animal word. Metaphor and metonymy are two vital methods for meaning extension, by studying derivational and collocative meanings of animal words, this thesis finds metaphor is dominant in English and metonymy in Chinese. Moreover, the principle of meaning change is also based on animal word concept frames: (an animal word's conceptual meaning) A—(a person who has a similar feature with that animal) a—(action or behavior) a'.This thesis is more comprehensive than previous studies on animal words, for it pays more attention to human's internal cognitive mechanisms. The systematic and comprehensive exploration could guide learning and teaching English or Chinese as a foreign language.