Word Meaning In English And Chinese Fuzzy Comparative Study

Content: From 20^th century, with the lingual turn of philosophical research, man gradually start to get free from the shackles of Two Valued Logic and realize the fact that a language is the synthesis of clearness and fuzziness. Although Eubulides, the delegate of Megarian School in ancient Greece in 4^th century BC, paid attention to and got to know the issue of fuzziness in language, the fire of the early thought extinguished. After 2,000 years late, in the beginning of the 20^th century, philosophers like Pierce, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc began to concentrate on the issue of fuzziness in languages, so did many linguists at the same time. In 1965, Zadeh dismissed the famous paper Fuzzy Set and establish the theory of fuzziness, on which some interdisciplines like Fuzzy Mathematics and Fuzzy Logic based. The paper A Fuzzy-Set-Theoretic Interpretation of Linguistic Hedges, which was issued by Zdeh in 1972, marked the establishment of Fuzzy linguistics. There are Generalized Fuzzy Linguistics and Narrow Fuzzy Linguistics. The former includes Fuzzy Phonetics, Fuzzy Semantics, Fuzzy Pragmatics, Fuzzy Rhetorical and so on. The later only focus on the fuzzy border between words or/and phrases, so this paper belong to the range of Narrow Fuzzy Linguistics by studying the fuzziness of words or/and phrases only. Word meanings are different slices of things in the world and the relations between them by different cultures, "slices of the things refer to different cutting and abstracting of an individual or the world by different culture (not always scientific and logic)." Fuzziness caused by different cutting could be revealed more obvious by comparing different words with similar or equal denotation in different languages. In this paper, by comparing the word fuzziness between English and Chinese, together with analysis of biased errors during second language acquisition, we'll discuss the fuzziness between words in order to have a deep understanding of the language characteristic of fuzziness and utilize the comparison between word fuzziness indifferent languages to improve second language teaching and learning.In Chapter One, we have a brief retrospect of the research history of Fuzzy Linguistics, demonstrate that fuzziness is the essential characteristic of languages and discuss the reasons of fuzziness. Then talk about the research object in Fuzzy Linguistics and its differences between generalization, ambiguity, vagueness and indefinite reference. In the last section, possibility of comparison between word meaning in English and Chinese is narrated as well as more and more importance is attached to it in second language teaching field. Chapter Two is the main part of the paper. In Cognitive Linguistics the world is a continuum. We regard a semantic field as a continuum according to the theory of semantic field and divide continuums into linear continuums, planar continuums and tridimensional continuums by different cutting models between words by which a continuum is divided. We also divide linear continuums into dipolar linear continuums, linear continuum of number axis and circular ones and demonstrate every type of them. In Chapter Three, we discuss the fuzzy belonging of hyponim to a hypernym, taking vegetables and fruits as examples. In Chapter Four, phenomena of concept split and concept vacancy are analyzed. We noticed that different language cuts a certain continuum indifferent amount, which leads levels of fuzziness of concept denotation different in different languages. We nominate this chapter Clear in One Language, but Fuzziness in Another, because the denotation of a word in one language is cut into two or several parts in another. It easily causes negative transfers in second language learning. In Chapter Five, the differences of the transfer of clearness and fuzziness in different languages are discussed from three aspects, the phenomenon of how clearness turn into fuzziness, fuzziness to clearness and changes of degree of belonging. At last there is a conclusion. The significance of research on fuzzy language is explained as deepening the understanding of fuzziness of languages, its enlightenment and guide to the second language teaching and learning and the direction on compiling bilingual dictionaries.