A Contrastive Study Of The Words And Phrases Of "Dog" And "dog" In Chinese And English

Language is the carrier of culture. As the core and the most active element oflanguage, vocabulary often carries heavy historical and cultural heritage of the nation.Therefore vocabulary study, especially the comparative study of the cultural lexicon,is becoming one of the most important subjects taken seriously by experts andscholars. Through the study of a specific language or a certain type of specificvocabulary, we are able to understand a nation’s history, culture and society from theinformation passed out by language and vocabulary. On the other hand, we canexplore the development and the evolution footprint of language and vocabulary bystudying a particular aspect of a nation’s history, culture and society.In this paper, I took the most commonly used animal terms: The words relatedwith "dog" as a research object. I collected all of the words related to dog and theroot dog after accessing dozens in the authoritative dictionary. In order to comparethe meaning of dog in Chinese-English morpheme, as well as Chinese-English, thedog family word group and the semantic system, I analyzed the similarities anddifference between them from three angles including semantic cognition, metaphorcognition and affective cognition. Then I tried to explain the reason for suchsimilarities and differences from three aspects including the natural geographicalenvironment, social history and culture, folk customs and mythological legends.