A Contrastive Study Of The Linguistic Images Of English And Chinese Semantic Expressions

For a long time, the literary image is thought of as an effective way to describe the perceptual world, which appears a lot of common features between Chinese literature and English literature. However, image as a basic principle in the cognitive linguistics covers larger scope than that of the literary image, and differences occur in the course of reflecting the world linguistically encoded in Chinese or in English. So, the linguistic image focuses on revealing such differences manifesting by these corresponding linguistic markers.Saussure thinks language is a "naming" process with the basic unit "concept" and "sound image" used to record the world, and the "concept" is what the signification concerns and "sound image" equals to the signal. This is just identical with Humboldt's thought of "the phonological form and the conceptual form". From this deduction, we demark that the signal involves in all the linguistic forms, which are termed as the linguistic image in this thesis. As Langacker holds that "language is an integral part of human cognition, so any account of linguistic structure should therefore articulate with what is known about cognitive processing in general, regardless of whether one posits a special language 'module'". Image, studied as one of the most important principles in the cognitive linguistics, really concerns this process of describing in terms of the focal adjustment how the human being experiences the entity within a scene; then, the experiential result must be recorded in the form of speech or writing with some corresponding linguistic markers inflecting the foregrounding point selected by the focal adjustment. Therefore, we can combine the linguistic image and the image of the cognitive linguistics together as the theoretical base to extend our contrast.As the linguistic system mainly consists of the phonology, lexicon and syntax, so we will go on the synchronic contrastive study of the linguistic images of Chinese and English semantic expressions on the phonological, lexical and syntactic levels. On the one hand, Chinese and English, by nature, are the signal to convey the information of the signification, so the linguistic image of Chinese and English as one way to convey the concept shows some similarities: the similar pictorial prototype, the similar cognitive model and the similar developing trend. On the other, Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language and English to Indio-European language, thus Chinese characters are pictophonetic and Chinese is analytic in contrast to alphabetic English letters and synthetic-analytic English. Due to such language-specific features, Chinese linguistic image is by far less in number and various in forms than those of English linguistic image.Although Chinese linguistic image is relatively limited, it has come to the increasing trend as the historic development of Chinese. Under the influence of western language and the internal driving force, Chinese takes on counting on more and more linguistic images typically as inflections, propositions, and connectives to convey grammatical concepts. From this point, we can say that Chinese is becoming to more and more sophisticated as equipped with the growth of the linguistic image.Through the synchronic contrast of Chinese and English and the diachronic study of the Chinese, it is effective to say that both Chinese and English are increasingly resorting to the linguistic markers to convey the semantic images; however, Chinese appears as less uninflectional when compared with the inflectional English.Above all, this thesis proposes the term—the linguistic image inspired by the conception of "sound image" mentioned in Saussure's theory of the sign. Then, it comes to a creative attempt to contrast the linguistic expressions of English and Chinese from the cognitive perspective synchronically and diachronically. Consequently, all the findings indicate that the linguistic image is generally playing critical role whatever in Chinese or English to transfer some grammatical concept staked out by means of some conceptualized linguistic marker; and that it appears more popular in English than in Chinese for the language-specific distinctive. Moreover, Chinese is inclined to develop its system of the linguistic images to fulfill the need of its development. To be honest, bearing the particular features of Chinese and English as well as Chinese characters and English letters showed in the process of recording the conceptualized world, we can guide our foreign language teaching and studying. It will also cultivate the students' enthusiasm in learning English when they get to know the knowledge of the target language and the mother tongue.