A Corpus-based Research On The Cognitive Cultural Models In Chinglish

With the unprecedented spread of English all over the world, various varieties ofEnglish have came into being, such as native varieties of English, like “AmericanEnglish”, African varieties of English, and Asian varieties of English, like “SingaporeEnglish”. Therefore, the term “World Englishes” has been popular among ordinarypeople and studies on various varieties of English have become a trend in manylinguistic schools, especially the Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Studies on “Chinglish”,following this trend, are also getting more and more attention.Due to the continuous promotion and popularization of English in China, Englishlearning attracts more and more attention. As for most English learners in China, theirEnglish has strong Chinese characteristics, namely “Chinglish” because of a variety offactors, especially the influence of their Chinese cognitive cultural models. Thisphenomenon has caused widespread concern in academic circles, and many scholarshave studied it from different angles. However, most studies focus on the descriptionsof Chinglish performance at various levels of language, or the interpretation of thereasons for Chinglish based on different theories, such as Interlanguage, LanguageTransfer, Error Analysis and English Variety theory, etc. They fail to explain thereasons fundamentally. This thesis tends to investigate the deep cultural cognitivereasons of Chinglish produced by Chinese English learners from the CognitiveSociolinguistic perspective, with the combination of the three aspects of cognition,society and culture.With the aid of the two corpora CLEC and Frown, this thesis aims to discover theChinese cognitive cultural models of FAMILY among Chinese English learners fromthe perspective of the cognitive cultural model theory in Cognitive Sociolinguistics.Meanwhile, it tends to find out the discrepancies of the cultural models betweenChinese English learners and native speakers. Thereby, it is hoped that the cognitivecultural models instantiated by Chinglish expressions could be discovered. Thespecific research method is to collect examples of the use of FAMILY from the two corpora and then classify the conceptualization types of FAMILY by the means ofquantitative statistics and qualitative analysis. The major research results are asfollowing:In the context of Chinese culture, the conceptualizations of FAMILY are:“Residential houses are families”,“Communities are families”,“Social units arefamilies” and “The nation is a FAMILY”, etc. However, in the context of westernculture, people stress “the nuclear FAMILY members and their intimate relationships”,“values” and “warm feelings”. Obviously, the extension of the prototypical meaningsof FAMILY in Chinese culture is much broader than that of western culture. Due tothe different cognitive cultural models in the two distant cultures, then, discrepanciesof conceptualizations come into being. Chinese English learners will inevitablysuperimpose their own Chinese cognitive cultural models into western models, fromwhich the Chinglish expressions may arise. Based on this research result, this thesisput forward several ideas for the teaching process, that is, to strongly recommend theemphasis on understanding of cognitive models in particular culture. As for theinstantiations of some cultural key words or other expressions that areculturally-saturated, if not appreciated or ignored, they are likely to cause interculturalmiscommunications. Therefore, teaching and learning of culture, including that ofChinese culture should be introduced in English teaching. Due to various reasons, thethesis still has limitations, but it does have some values as long as the research maylead to further reflections and explorations.