Acomparative Study Of The Semantic Components And Lexicalization Of English And Chinese "say" Type Verbs

"Say"type verbs are used to express one's ideas in way of speaking. Both English and Chinese are rich in them. In the thesis,"say"type verbs refers to those which express one's ideas under different conditions and possess a common semantic feature: opening mouth to utter or make sounds. This thesis makes a detailed contrastive study of English and Chinese"say"type verbs based on such theories as semantic field theory, componential analysis and lexicalization.At first,"say"type verbs that have the core semantic component"say"from two dictionaries, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary are collected. There are 220 and 334"say"type verbs in English and Chinese respectively. Next, the peripheral semantic components of them are idenfied in terms of semantic field theory and observations of their definitions. Then they are analyzed through componential analysis one by one and categorized into different semantic fields. In the end, they are compared in view of semantic components which involves core and peripheral semantic components and their distributions, and lexicalization which involves lexicalization degree and lexicalization pattern.Through the analysis, the thesis finds out that, from the perspective of quantity, Chinese has more words than English in"say"type verbs semantic fields, and there are 114 more words in Chinese than in English. From the perspective of semantic components, both English and Chinese have the core semantic component"say", but they differ from each other in category and proportion. In terms of category, Chinese has two more semantic peripheral components of Content and Effect. In terms of proportion, there are far more words in English than in Chinese in Manner field, with 38.6% for English and only 18.6% for Chinese. In Emotion, Purpose and Attitude fields, there are comparatively more Chinese"say"type verbs than English. In view of lexicalization degree, there are 97.7% simple words in English while there are only 14.4% simple words in Chinese and 85.6% are compound words, and therefore, English has a higher lexicalization degree. The reasons are explored from three aspects of morphology, word-formation and culture. The lexicalization pattern for both English and Chinese is"Motion +Manner/Cause +X". The thesis finds out the core and peripheral semantic components of"say"type verbs in both English and Chinese and their distributions so that the differences and similarities are clarified; Their lexicalization degrees are also identified and their lexicalization pattern is proposed, thus confirming and enriching Talmy's Lexicalization Pattern of Motion Events theory. It sets a good example for contrastive studies of meanings of words and it can also be applied in the acquisition and translation of"say"type verbs in both English and Chinese.