A Cognitive Analysis On Chinese Dish Names

China’s food culture has a very long history, as the old saying goes," Food is the first necessity of human being." This notion is the most important and essential core of Chinese culture and life, fully showing that the diet plays a very important role in people’s daily life. There are many different kinds of food embodying the broad and profound Chinese diet. Many previous scholars mainly studied the Chinese dish names from the perspective of translation theory, translation skills, and culture. There are also a few scholars making a simple analysis from the perspective of pragmatics and linguistics. Although all the studies were based on the external forms of dish names, they also provided reference for the increasingly perfect studies. This thesis is mainly from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and studied with some typical Chinese dish names as examples, according to the differences of the metaphorical ontologies, the naming of these dishes is classified mainly in terms of the shapes and colors of dishes, or the pronunciation of dishes on the basis of phonetic metaphor. This study aims to systematically analyze how these artistical dish names are named and cognized by people. In addition, this study also enriches the applied research of metaphorical meanings in daily life. The result shows that the naming of Chinese dishes is not arbitrary and unanalyzable, thus the naming of Chinese dishes is reasonable and analyzable. Cognition plays an important role in the naming of Chinese dishes. The importance of Chinese dish names is not just in the single signified function, but more importantly reflects the rich cultural connotation implied in the dish names. Besides, more and more new and creative, even inappropriate and inelegant dish names come into being, thus the further studies deserve to be made in future.