"candle" And Cognitive Candle A Semantic Contrast

The objective of the study is the National Cultural Connotation (NCC) of CANDLE both in Chinese and English language. CANDLE, born from certain history and culture, contains the social status and culture development within its meaning branches which may discover the cultural influence to languages and which, on the other hand, feature the characteristics of certain nations. The communication between culture and language enlightens the study to compare CANDLE in both languages for difference in corresponding cultures.As the NCC origins from the mutual effect by objective reflect and subjective consciousness which exhibits different thinking patterns of different nations, the study take a culture-cognition research method to make a unified framework constructed by prototype theory and Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM) in Cognitive Linguistics and NCC in cultural linguistics. Every nation owns distinguished culture which shows the thinking pattern and language expressing. The difference in languages discovers the difference in culture by the research method of cross language.The study first argues on the origin of CANDLE in both languages as the fundamental for NCC meanings development. The NCC meanings study, including prototype meanings, branch meanings, their relations and development patterns, are then analyzed based on prototype theory and ICM. The contrast focuses on the development paths rather than individual meanings. Therefore, the arrangement of the chapters is listed below: Chapter One is about the theories, including NCC and ICM. Chapter Two and Three are to set up the individual meanings and lexical network. Chapter Four contrasts the prototype meanings of CANDLE. Chapter Five and Six contrast the development paths respectively. And Chapter Seven makes a conclusion of the contrasts.