A Study On Semantic Meaning And Grammar Of Modern Chinese Taste Words

As a small word group in modern Chinese vocabulary system, the taste words are rarein number, but widely used. Their unique characteristics are also presented in syntactic andsemantic aspects. In this paper, based on the previous study and the synchronic level ofmodern Chinese, we use a large number of linguistic facts to make an in-depth study on thesyntactic function and cognitive metaphorical competences of Chinese taste words. Thispaper consists of four chapters.The first chapter is introduction. It mainly introduces the purpose and significance ofthis topic, and current research in semantic, syntactic, cognitive, cultural, typology aspectsof taste words in modern Chinese by predecessors, and also introduces the sources ofcorpus.In the second chapter, firstly, the taste words are defined and classified in theperspective of linguistics, and sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, salty, fresh are identified as the sixbasic taste words in modern Chinese. Then according to the theory of cognitive linguistics,the working mechanism of taste metaphor is discussed. Finally, through further research inprevious study on syntax of the adjective words group, metaphor study on the taste words,we find the key point in this paper.The third chapter investigates the syntactic function of the six basic taste words inmodern Chinese. On the basis of the main syntactic functions of adjectives, this chapteranalyses the basic gustatory adjectives in turn, represents their syntactic functions asdifferent components, such as the subject, predicate, object, attributive, adverbial,complement, and analyses their syntactic and grammatical meaning. It has discussions onfeatures related to the taste words "bitter" when it is used as an object and adverbial, anddiscuss the two different situations when taste words are used as complements.The fourth chapter firstly presents the usages of taste words in modern Chinese baseon corpus statistics, then according to the different meaning types of the taste words and the metaphor used in taste words, we investigate the taste words separately and carefully inthe perspective of metaphor, and then summarizes the formational mechanism of tastemetaphors, and also discusses the causes of the imbalance in metaphorical competence ofthe taste words.