A Cognitive Approach To Semantic Structure Of Chinese Dish Names

China enjoys the reputation of "the kingdom of food" and Chinese people’s conceptions about food have been a thread going through the long history of Chinese culture. Chinese people believe that exquisite dish should be matched with elegant names behind which there are interesting stories or allusions for people to talk about, holding that a wonderful dish name is not only a vivid advertisement, but also an inseparable part of the dish itself for it can please people and satisfies their psychological needs. Moreover, part of food culture is deeply rooted in Chinese traditional culture. In the new century, China will continue to open to the outside world, further reform to demonstrate its new and attractive image, to play a bigger role in the international arena. We will introduce more Chinese traditional culture in order to promote mutual exchange and strengthen the relationship between the Chinese people and the people of the world. Under such a background, researches on Chinese dish names have attracted more and more attention. At present, most of the researches are focused on the translation of Chinese dish names. In addition, the existing researches are based on the understanding of a certain or single theory. These researches did not view dish names as a kind of language phenomenon to carry out comprehensive and systemic study. Besides, the following questions have never been discussed in a unified account:How do Chinese dish names produced? What is the semantic structure of Chinese dish names? Therefore, based on existing research, present thesis, taking the representative dish names of eight cuisines of China as the objects, aims to systematically analyze the cognitive semantic structure of Chinese dish names, and attempt to interpret the naming of dishes using the theory of experiential view, prominence view and attentional view of cognitive linguistics, in order to contribute to further researches pursuing a comprehensive and thorough account of Chinese dish names.The present paper consists of five chapters, with the introduction as Chapter One.Chapter Two examines previous approaches of scholars, i.e. cultural approach, functional approach and Chinese dish names in translation study. After exploring the previous studies, the originality of present paper can be obviously revealed, since present paper debates the characteristics of naming of dishes and semantic structure of dish names on the support of cognitive approach. Some basic principles and a few essential concepts are introduced in Chapter Three.Chapter Three introduces theoretical preliminaries. This chapter mainly lists a few essential concepts, such as three approaches of cognition, i.e. the experiential view, the prominence view and the attentional view. Moreover, Chapter Three makes an analysis of the relationship between Chinese dish names and these theories.Chapter Four concentrates on the cognitive interpretation of Chinese dish names, analyzing the characteristics of naming of dishes and semantic structure of Chinese dish names. In this chapter, it is noticed that the naming of dishes is not arbitrary, but motivated. Seven semantic components are involved, namely producers, ingredients, places, properties, cooking methods, and animals and plants. Specific analysis is illustrated by some typical examples cited from self-built closed corpus. At the same time, the study explores the typical semantic structure of Chinese dish names.Chapter five is a conclusion, in which the major findings are summarized. The theoretical and practical implications and the limitations of the present research as well as suggestions for further research are also talked about in this chapter.