A Comparative Study Of The Categorization Of Crops Between Southern China And Northern China From The Cognitive Linguistic Perspective:

Human beings gradually understand the world on the basis of experience and form rational thinking, then continuously improve their own knowledge system through the development of rich imagination. On the basis of human’s interactive experiences, categorization is the generalization about the universal nature of the objective things at the thinking level. It consists of the "gestalt" concept and is the subjective summary of the cognitive subjects on the outside entity, and it’s based on the subjective and objective interaction with the world around them. Categorization is the generalized results on the basis of social practice; in turn, it is also the tools for human beings to understand as well as to transform the world. The existing basic theories of categorization include the prototype theory and the classical theory of categories. Our study is based on the categorization theory of cognitive linguistics.China is a great country with rich resources and vast territory. Due to the long distance, there are differences in many aspects between the Southern and the Northern Regions, such as diet and culture, etc. Take the crops as an example, there are homonym and synonym phenomenon on their names. This thesis attempts to probe into this phenomenon and make a systematic discussion within the framework of categorization theory and the characteristics in the areas of south and north.The systematic study in this thesis eventually leads to the following findings:1. There exists different understanding of the same species between the South and the North. As the different awareness of the crops’origins, the South and the North may have different names for the same crop. For example, potatoes are called "tu dou" in the North, because they grow in the soil with a bean-like shape, round or oval; while in the South, people directly call their scientific name----"ma ling shu (potato)", not only because it’s a standard name, but also because people feel that it is a kind of potato, this name can clearly demonstrate their qualities.2. Due to the geographic differences between the South and the North, as well as the habits of naming in different regions, different crops may share the same name. Let us again take the potatoes for example, people in Shanxi call them "shan yao dan" while people in Anhui call them sweet potato. However, sweet potato is actually the scientific name for another crop named "hong shu ". Therefore, it is very difficult to distinguish one crop from another.Due to my limited academic ability, this thesis does not deeply analyze the reasons about the synonyms of the north-south crops. However, it is still a meaningful attempt for the naming of crops in the framework of cognitive linguistics, and I hope this thesis will provide a new perspective for the naming of crops.