Constructing Motivation Of Chinese And English Measure Word Of Noun: An Iconicity-based Contrastive Study

This thesis provides a contrastive analysis of the constructing motivation of Chinese and English measure word of noun from a cognitive perspective.The cognition of "quality" is a common basic skill of human beings and this cognition is deeply reflected in different language systems. As one of the Chinese eleven word classes, measure word is a very large, rich and active system. While English, which belongs to Indo-European family, only has ten word classes, from which the term "measure word" is absent. Nonetheless, it has varied kinds of expressions, playing the same role as the measure word in Chinese, which also constitute a large system. Generally, measure word can be divided into two classes:the ones for measuring the objects, which can be referred to as "measure words of noun", and the ones for measuring the actions, which can be called "measure words of verb" (Guo Xianzhen,1987).This thesis deals mainly with the former class.The theoretical foundation of this thesis is iconicity, one branch of cognitive linguistics. Iconicity has been a popular subject of cognitive linguistics in recent years. As an opposition to language arbitrariness in structural linguistics initiated by Saussure, iconicity refers to the natural connection between language structure and man's experiential or conceptual structure. From this theory we infer that the collocation between measure word and noun is not arbitrary but motivated. There must be certain relationship between man's experiential or conceptual structure and its motivation. It is this relationship that we focus on in this study.Generally speaking, iconicity falls into three types:diagrammatic iconicity, imagic iconicity and metaphorical iconicity. This thesis is based on the third type:metaphorical iconicity. We hold that metaphorical iconicity can be classified into analogical iconicity, metonymic iconicity and associative iconicity. Based on their usage, we divide measure words into six sub-classes:measure words denoting concrete individual things, measure words denoting abstract things, measure words denoting human and animal groups, measure words denoting collective things, measure words denoting volumes and measure word denoting categories. A large number of examples for Chinese and English measure words are collected and classified. Through the analysis of these examples, we argue that the collocation between measure word and noun is based on the three kinds of iconicity:analogical iconicity, metonymic iconicity and associative iconicity. And then we conclude the similarities and differences as well as the causes of the constructing motivation between Chinese and English measure words. At last, we point out the limitations of this thesis and discuss the suggestions for further research in this area.So far, the study on the collocation of measure word and noun from the iconic perspective has been rare, which is a reflection of the originality of this thesis. We hope that the study will shed light on the research and teaching of measure word acquisition as well as on the E-C and C-E measure word translation.