A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English N+N Compound Nouns

Compositional word-formation is an important sub-type of word-formation bothin Chinese and in English. The majority of modern Chinese vocabulary is compounds.There are many compounds in English and the status of compounding ranks second inEnglish word-formation, so it has great significance of research. Domestic and foreignscholars study compounds from various viewpoints and these researches are mainlyabout analyzing syntactic and semantic relations among components of Chinese andEnglish compounds. In recent years, many scholars study internal compounds fromthe viewpoint of cognitive linguistics, with cognitive linguistics developing rapidly.Based on studying previous researches and analyzing adequately the linguisticdata of Chinese and English N+N compound nouns, this thesis analyses the structureof Chinese and English N+N compound nouns and points out their similarities anddifferences and connotative cognitive mechanism, form the cognitive and semanticpoint of view. It can help us have a deeper understanding of Chinese and English N+Ncompounds. This thesis possesses directive significance to translation, contrastivestudy of Chinese and English, Chinese education, teaching Chinese as a foreignlanguage and information technology.This thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter one defines compounds andN+N compound nouns, and introduces the current researches on Chinese and Englishcompounds and N+N compound nouns. Chapter two briefly introduces the purposeand significance of the study, approaches and perspectives of this thesis. Chapter threecontrasts syntactic and semantic structure of Chinese and English N+N compoundnouns. Chapter four makes an analysis of decoding mechanism of Chinese andEnglish N+N compound nouns utilizing conceptual Blending Theory. The result ofcontrast proves that conceptual blending mechanism is universal. The psychologicalprocess of how Chinese and English N+N compound nouns’ meaning form isextremely similar, but the frequency of using different concrete conceptual blendingnetworks is different. Chapter five sets up a cognitive coding network based onConceptual Blending Theory, and points out that some other coding mechanisms also play a role in Chinese and English. Chinese and English N+N compound nouns haveabundant linguistic forms under the combined effect of these coding mechanisms.Chapter six is conclusion of this thesis, presenting the main viewpoints and the limitsof this paper.