A Corpus-Based Study Of Chinese "Hao" And English "Good" By Applying The NSM Approach

Over the centuries, people have been using diverse ways to define good and bad. A large number of scholars and experts have been putting ceaseless great efforts in figuring out their real significations across languages. Among the multifarious semantic approaches, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM for short) is the first approach to define "GOOD" (translated as "hao" in Chinese) as a universal semantic primitive. And NSM researchers have done a lot of semantic analyses on the primitive "GOOD", based on the natural metalanguage's viewpoint.This thesis has tried to testify semantic relations in comparison of the semantic primitives "good" and "hao" between English and Chinese, based on comparable corpus study from the viewpoint of the NSM Approach after full consideration of language and cultural differentials. With the help of related professional statistical calculation software, after referring to some well-known English and Mandarin dictionaries, the thesis has undertaken analysing all the cases of the primitives "good" and "hao" within the corpus. Later on, the thesis has calculated and discussed about the correlation of the valid frequencies between "good" and "hao" in the method of Pearson's Chi-Square Test. And at the same time the thesis makes classification and summary of all kinds of collocations of "good" and "hao". Finally, the thesis has testified that the primitives "good" and "hao" have a highly close correlation within the scale of the corpus, from a comprehensive perspective of semantics, statistics, case study and mathematics. Simultaneously, the thesis has offered experimental support and scientific numerical materials to the hypothesis of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage that each language should have 60 or so primitives.