A Study Of Analogical Culinary Words In English And Chinese: A Perspective Of Autonomy-Dependency

The objective of this thesis is to explain the productive mechanism of analogical culinarywords from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Analogy is an intentional imitation of a conventional expression for the purpose ofconveying meaning other than of the original one. They have aroused great interests ofscholars for their vivid, economical features, and they have become an important way offorming new words in recent years. Analogical words often appear with contrast to theoriginal words through context, so they could reveal the nature deeply and give greatimpression to people; meanwhile, they could make language dynamic and lively and createsharp humorous effect.For the previous studies at home and abroad, some scholars focused on the rhetoricalaspects of analogy; some stressed on the building rules of analogical words and regarded themas one of the most important ways of generating new words; some emphasized the internalrelationship between the structure and the meaning of analogical words; others paid attentionto the cross-language studies of analogical words. However, few have done some researchesfrom the cognitive perspective. Therefore, this thesis attempts to work out a productionmechanism of analogical culinary words within the Framework of Autonomy-Dependency.Behind their formation, a set of dynamic cognitive operation is involved, such as themotivation of their use and the choice of the original expressions.With regard to the research methodology, the current study mainly relies on thequalitative analysis of the data. With Xu Shenghuan’s Autonomy-Dependency Framework asthe general guiding framework, this study concentrates on the generation process ofanalogical culinary words. The theory holds that the explicit expression of an utterance is derived from the intentional content in a speaker’s mind; with the constraint of thecommunicative intentionality by making use of the principle of similarity/proximity. XuShenghuan’s theory ushers in a new perspective for the study of language application (徐盛桓,2007). Based on Xu Shenghuan’s framework, the thesis attempts to build up a framework foranalogical culinary words. Within this theory, the following two questions will be answered:1)What is the relationship between the analogical culinary word and its origin?2) How does theanalogy in culinary words come into being?The source word serves as the implicit expression or the autonomous element, while thetarget word expressed by the speaker serves as the explicit expression or the dependentelement. The source word is guided by the communicative intention, making use of therelation of proximity and similarity to derive the dependent element; the means for thederivation is nipping-along. The existence and operation of the target word is guided by theautonomy’s intentionality, and the application of the dependency should reflect theautonomy’s intentionality. In some given situation the dependency can be reverted to theautonomy.This study shows that analogical culinary words can be explained under theAutonomy-Dependency Framework; meanwhile, it provides a new research method for theculinary words. However, there are still some limitations in this study. We merely provide apossible interpretation and explore some kinds of analogical culinary words, and whether themechanism is adequate for other kinds of analogical culinary words needs furtherinvestigation.