Study Of The Vocabulary Of Chinese Flora And Fauna And Its Pragmatic And Cultural Awareness

Wilhelm Freiherrvon Humboldt, the famous German linguist, ever said language is the unconsciously emission of thinking, and the relationship between language and mental activity was emphasized in his linguistic theory. According his theory, each nationality has its distinctive way of thinking, and by the investigation to the language of a nationality, its inclination of thinking can be known.Directiveness, symbolizeness and indistinctness are three main distinguishing features of Chinese, those features influence many aspects of the language. The creation of animal-words and plant-words and the pragmatic way of these words are researched in this thesis. Animal-words and plant-words are achievements of people's knowledge of the world, so the trial of mental activity could be found by investigating these words.Besides human being, animals and plants are living creatures on the earth, and these living, colorful creatures are noticed from the fist breath of man. Animals and plants are the essential resources, without which, human can not survive. Furthermore, they are objects we have been recognizing and cognizing, their life and death are so similar to those of people, so we always use them to imply our life. Animal-words and plant-words are not only signifier of linguistic symbol, but the symbol of living creatures, which have the culture-conveying function.There are many achievements about Chinese anima-words or plant-words, but few of them study them together and seldom focused on their lexical function and rhetorical function. While in this thesis, with the theory of cognitive linguistics and cultural linguistics, the lexical function, rhetorical function and culture-conveying function of animal words and plant-words are researched according the similarity of cognitive way of recognizing animals and plants.