Viewing Chinglish Errors From The Perspective Of C-E Conceptual Difference—Chinglish Errors Analysis And Correction Through Conceptual Metaphor

As a commonly seen second language acquisition phenomenon, Chinglish obsesses almost every Chinese English-learner without regard to his or her English proficiency. Since Chinglish expressions characterize themselves not in grammar or spelling, but more at the semantic and pragmatic level, thus always leaving their producers unconscious about them. But to native English speakers, such errors are quite obvious and unacceptable. The reason lies in the different conceptual systems underlying Chinese and English.Lacking theoretical foundation, traditional teaching theories consider Chinglish errors, especially semantic errors as too complicated to analyze and correct; English teaching in China have to advocate students to "think through English" instead of prescribing solutions for them.Fortunately, rapid development of cognitive linguistics has shed new light on the study of SLA, which lays theoretical foundation for analyzing and correcting Chinglish. Marcel Danesi proposed the notion "conceptual fluency" in1995.1997witnessed Alice Deignan and her team’s suggestion about "teaching English metaphors using cross-linguistic awareness-raising activities". In2008, Zhou Pin elaborates in the article On the Feasibility of Correcting Chinglish Errors with Cognitive Approaches that Chinglish originates from conceptual difference between Chinese and English, and the feasibility of correcting Chinglish through conceptual metaphor has been demonstrated.Based on previous studies, the present study works on the following aspects and arrives at conclusions as follows:1. Clarifying the essence of Chinglish—expressing Chinese conceptual system in the form of English language.2. Verifying Zhou’s viewpoint:Chinglish originates from conceptual difference between Chinese and English through reviewing previous studies on conceptual metaphor’s application to SLA.3. Inspired by Deignan’s cross-linguistic comparison of metaphor, a Chinglish analysis procedure of comparing conceptual metaphors extracted from Chinglish expressions and their English revisions is proposed.4. The proposed procedure is applied to analyze a number of Chinglish discourses and their English revisions. The result shows that conceptual metaphor is found most effective in interpreting and correcting Chinglish errors—misuse of words.5. Other than misuse of words, the study finds out that conceptual metaphor is also capable of interpreting Chinglish problem of redundancy. Chinese and English conceptual systems also rule their syntactical organization. Finding out the conceptual metaphor producing redundant sentence structure will significantly help students reduce redundancy when expressing them in English.Limited by time and space, the author fails to exhaust Chinglish expressions; instead the author only generalizes a number of Chinese conceptual metaphors causing Chinglish. According to data, the present study serves to exemplify the procedure in which Chinglish is analyzed and corrected through conceptual metaphor. Moreover, through limited number of Chinglish expressions, the study verifies the point that conceptual metaphor theory is capable of analyzing and correcting Chinglish errors. Furthermore, systematicity of conceptual metaphor allows one conceptual metaphor to correct several similar Chinglish errors subjected to the conceptual metaphor, thus making Chinglish errors no longer disorderly and unsystematic for classification and correction.For future SLA in China, this study serves as a possible solution concerning "how to think in English". English teachers should raise students’ awareness of conceptual difference between Chinese and English through analyzing Chinglish errors in terms of conceptual metaphor to them, and the present study serves as a possible model to follow.