Chinese Word "water" Of The Semantic Category And Cognitive Metaphor Study

Lexis, as the construction material of language, is an extremely important element inpeople’s daily communication and thinking. It is known to all that Chinese lexis resemblesgigantic and complicated net with enormous words and abundant meanings, which directlyreflects the cognitive characteristic of this nation and forms the typical Chinese way ofthinking and pattern of conduct. Among Chinese vocabulary, there are certain wordsbearing the same category symbols, which present similar semantic correlation andmetaphorical cognitive features in terms of sound, forms and meanings. Therefore, thosewords comprise the word family mentioned in this thesis.As the most fundamental concept in the nature, the Chinese word “water” flourishesin the Chinese lexical and writing system; meanwhile it is a most commonly used wordwith abundant various meanings in the history of Chinese language. The group of wordswith the same category symbol of water can be divided into three categories, simplexwords, composite words and idioms with the word “water”. Those words are thus calledword family of water. This thesis explores the Chinese word-family of water by carryingon an exhaustive and comprehensive investigation and analysis of the data concerningwater from various Chinese dictionaries and online Chinese corpus, with the aim to yield aprofound explanation about word-family of water in terms of semantics of metaphoricalcognition.The thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction dealing withthe identification of word family of water, the study content, significance, andmethodology and data source based on a review of previous study on this topic. ChapterTwo makes use of the theory of modern Chinese lexicology to grammatically describe andanalyze the lexical system of water which involves the characteristics of word family ofwater and words formation. Chapter Three further analyzes the semantic category of thewords in the word family of water in Chinese and makes a meticulous classification ofthose words. Chapter Four, under the framework of cognitive linguistics, concentrates on adetailed metaphor cognitive analysis of the words in the word family of water and elicits afull-scale explanation of their word formation and cognitive model; moreover, the secondpart of this chapter probes into both the experiential and cognitive bases from which "generate the metaphorical expressions in the word family of water. Chapter Five, the lastchapter, draws conclusions out of the above findings.