A Cognitive Study On Metaphorical Expressions Of "Chi" In Chinese Based On National Cultural Semantics

National Cultural Linguistics studies the national cultural phenomenon in alanguage and the linguistic phenomenon in national culture, and it also focuses onthe interrelationship between language and national cultures. National CulturalSemantics is an important branch of National Cultural Linguistics, which is calledCultural Semantics or Folkloric Semantics by some linguists. National culturalvocabularies usually have close relationship with a nation’s politics, history,geography, religion, faith, and folk customs, etc. On the one hand, national culturalvocabularies reflect denotative and conceptual meaning, and on the other, theysolidify and contain deep cultural meanings. National cultural vocabularies, to a largeextent, have cultural tint of a certain nation in which they come into existence. Theunderstanding of national cultural vocabularies depends on people’s built-inrecognition of a certain culture. On the base of folk customs some vocabularies inChinese get National Cultural Connotations (NCC) via metaphorization andmetonymization mechanisms.Chi is the common and fundamental living manner of human being. Chi inChinese, reflected to linguistic level, can be divided into literal chi and metaphoricalchi. This thesis expounds some basic idea of national cultural semantics, and thenuses metaphorical expressions of chi as a case study to narrate and discuss. Bycollecting and arranging the expressions and sayings of chi in Chinese, the thesisfinds that chi is generally used metaphorically and chi has rich NCCs, with deepcultural tint of China. And the reasons are probably at the root of special chi culturein China and Chinese way of thinking.The thesis mainly discusses the following aspects:1) The numerous existence ofmetaphorical chi expressions is a concrete representation of Chinese chi culture. Andthe understanding of its NCC is a process that the subject of cognition makessemantic inference by using metaphor, metonymy or conceptual integration, and thesemantic inference meets the ongoing context.2) TCFL should consider NCCs ofwords so that students can fully understand the meaning of words and Chineseculture.3) during the translating practice, we should avoid granted replacementbetween two languages.4) the study of NCC also gives some revelations tolexicography.The cognitive study of national cultural vocabularies gives theoreticalsignificance to TCFL, intercultural communication, translation and dictionarycompilation.