A Semantic Analysis Of Tactile Adjective In English And Chinese

Tactile sense refers to the experience arising from human skin surface caused by the external stimuli, it is the general name of mechanical stimulus including touching, slithering and pressing sensations. Tactile-sense adjectives refer to adjectives expressing such kind of tactile properties and tactile feelings. In both English and Chinese, there are a huge number of tactile-sense adjectives that are widely used. This paper selecting the four English tactile-sense adjectives "cold"/"hot"/"soft"/"hard" and the corresponding four tactile-sense adjectives "leng"/"re"/"ruan"/"ying" in Chinese as the studying object, extracted their dictionary listing senses, conducted detail semantic analyses on these senses by using Semantic Component Analysis method, and then drew on their semantic derivation rules by discussing the relations among each sense. On this basis, this paper attempted to find the common semantic meanings shared by the discussed English and Chinese tactile-sense adjectives and also their own semantic meanings through conducting a semantic comparative study on English and Chinese tactile-sense adjectives, and ultimately to make an in-depth explanation on it.Through a semantic contrastive study on four groups of basic tactile adjectives-"cold/leng, hot/re, soft/ruan, and hard/ying" between English and Chinese, it comes to the conclusion that, on the one hand, based on the common physiological mechanism, the same perception organs and some similar experiences shared by human beings, each correspondent group of words between English and Chinese, such as "cold" and "leng","hot" and "re","soft" and "ruan","hard" and "ying" has the same basic meanings and extended meanings. On the other hand, due to different nations, different cultural backgrounds and different living habits, which decides the different ways of thinking between Chinese and English, and sometimes may have different perceptions on the same thing, in the language expressions, it may lead to completely different meanings. On this basis, the paper further explores the process of and characteristics in meaning derivation of English and Chinese tactile adjectives. It finally generates two main conclusions:(1) in both English and Chinese, two tactile adjectives with antonymous relations, their extended meanings generally exists antonymous relations.(2) The characteristics in meaning derivation process of English and Chinese tactile adjectives are basically the same. Tactile adjectives in addition to describing the physiological phenomena can also be extended to describe mental phenomena, by mapping specific domain to abstract domains. Deriving from the original physiological meanings to psychological and emotional meanings, it embodies the thinking ways of human-from the concrete to the abstract.These studies will be of great significance in helping learners better understand the meanings of tactile adjectives, and ultimately, enrich this kind of contrastive studies cross languages.