A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Lexical Motivation And Its Application To English Teaching

The study of motivation is a further exploration of linguistics. As English teachers it is quite necessary to study the motivation of English vocabulary, and compare it with that of Chinese vocabulary on the basis of previous studies.This thesis, first of all, clarifies the relationship between motivation and arbitrariness, and that between motivation and inner form, and then gives a clear definition of motivation. Next, based on the previous studies of others and the degree of contribution to English teaching, motivation is divided into five types—phonetic motivation, morphological motivation, semantic motivation, etymological motivation and writing motivation. After that, the differences between the motivation of the English vocabulary and that of the Chinese vocabulary are expounded from the five aspects. At last the thesis makes an attempt to apply the findings of the study to English vocabulary teaching and translation teaching.Language motivation is the foundation of explaining linguistic signs. It reflects various relationships between signal and signification. After detailed study on lexical motivation and comparison of the motivation between English and Chinese vocabulary, this thesis comes to the followings:Motivation is a basic character of vocabulary; it is the causes of why the words are what they are. Language at the level of vocabulary is not arbitrary, but obviously motivated. Motivation should be taken as the fundamental character of vocabulary. This thesis proves with abundant examples that the teaching efficiency of English vocabulary can be greatly improved with the aid of motivation theory, and that by comparing the motivation of English and Chinese vocabularies, the similarities and differences between them can be found, hence a more precise translation between the two languages.There have been many studies on lexical motivation at home and abroad, but the comparative study on English and Chinese lexical motivation is far from enough. So the significance of this thesis is to study the motivation of English vocabulary and find the similarities of and differences between the lexical motivation of the two languages by comparing their phonetic motivation, morphological motivation, semantic motivation, etymological motivation and writing motivation, and make the findings of the study benefit English vocabulary teaching and translation. Studying lexical motivation enables people to know and grasp the causes of the formation and the change of vocabulary, and reveal the reasons why people coin new words in certain ways. What is more, in English teaching, English lexical motivation can help teachers explain English words more accurately and systematically, hence twice the result with half the effort; and the findings of the comparative study of lexical motivation between English and Chinese vocabularies can be applied to translation, as a result of which, the translation can be made more equivalent in function.