A Contrastive Study Of Vocabulary At Basic Level In English, Chinese And Yi Language Based On Prototype Theory

The prototype theory put forward by the scientist and linguist Rosch has beendeveloped further and applied into other fields such as lexicon analysis, grammar in thepast years. However, it is rare for the prototype theory to be applied into the studies ofthe vocabularies at the basic level among different languages. If any, the application ofprototype theory in the vocabularies at the basic level is limited to languages within anation or a country. Therefore, the application of prototype theory into this thesis ischallenging, since it aims to apply the prototype theory into the study of three languages,namely, English, Yi language and Chinese. And the thesis aims at making a contrastivestudy of vocabularies at the basic level in four categories, which are animal category,plant category, clothing category and utensil category among the three languages. Thereason why the four categories are chosen here is that the differences of the fourcategories among the three languages are mostly striking and the four kinds ofcategories are closely related to people’s life.The prototype in a category can be viewed as the best examples in a category, thecategory members that have more attributes compared with other category members inthe same category or the category members that first come into people’s mind.Prototype theory gives a good account of levels of categorization, especially at the basiclevel. And there is a symbiosis between the prototype in a category and its basic levelcategories, since prototype categories are most fully developed in the basic level and the vocabularies at the basic level only function as they do because they are structured asprototype categories. Therefore, the thesis will take the notion that the vocabularies atthe basic level in the four categories are the category members which have the higherfrequency of occurrence and are the ones that first come into one’s mind and have moreattributes in the same category.To find out the differences of the vocabularies at the basic level among the threelanguages, a survey is carried out in the study, in which there are altogether90subjectsthat are involved, with30subjects respectively speaking English, Chinese and Yilanguage as their mother tongue. And three tasks are assigned in this survey, task oneand two are listing tasks finished within time limit, while task three is about thesubordinate level categories to find more about how the three different kinds of subjectscognize things.An analysis is done according to the collected data. It turns out that there reallyexist differences about the vocabularies at the basic level among the three languages.And these basic level categories the subjects listed are closely related to their daily lifeand have a high frequency of occurrence. And these basic level vocabularies varyamong the three languages, showing that different subjects have different cognitivemodels which are affected by their own culture. Therefore, the study gives us somethoughts and perspectives on the aspects such as language teaching, cross culturalcommunication and the survival of the language. For example, in language teaching,language teachers should be aware of the differences among basic level vocabularies tofacilitate language teaching. What’s more, in cross-cultural communication, we need toknow these differences of the basic level vocabularies to avoid misunderstandings.Meanwhile, as vocabulary is the basic unit of a language, some languages spoken byminority groups are likely to be influenced by Mandarin or English under thebackground of globalization of education, therefore, it is urgent that we take somemeasures to prevent some languages from extinction.