A Comparative Study On Lexical Meanings Between Chinese And American Signed Languages From The Perspective Of Cognition

Signed language is the language used among the deaf all over the world, and it is the main tool for deaf people to exchange ideas, express feelings, access information and participate in social activities and everyday life. The development of cognitive science offers a new, systematic and more powerful perspective for the research of signed language vocabulary.Language is both a symbol system and a reflection of the human mind and cognitive tools. The research on language iconicity, metaphor and metonymy is an important part of cognitive linguistics whose research results are equally applicable to signed language. Because signed language is a visual language, the expressions of all nonvisual concepts are inevitably bound to reside in the visual imagery as a destination. People tend to cognize and understand the cognitive domain of the unknown with the help of the known cognitive domain knowledge, and create a new concept, which is the process of metaphor. In addition, people take advantage of conceptual mutual mapping within a domain to understand an unknown concept with the help of a known one, whose process is called the formation of metonymy. However, due to the differences of regions, races and ways of thinking, there are many similarities and differences among people’s cognition. Therefore, there are a lot of similarities and differences between Chinese Signed Language and American Signed Language as well.In this thesis,36sets of CSL and ASL vocabulary gallery are constructed on the research basis of Chinese Sign Language and The American Sign Language Handshape Dictionary; from a cognitive perspective, six aspects of CSL and ASL, such as Direct Expression, Number Expression, Hand-shape Expression, etc. are compared and analyzed based on iconicity theory. Moreover, the lexical semantic change of CSL and ASL is contrasted and analyzed by using metaphorical and metonymic theories to demonstrate the differences and similarities between them and to further clarify the meaning of comparative studies. The result shows that iconicity, iconicity-based metaphor and metonymy play a crucial role in signed language lexical generation and semantic change and they are the main formative ways of signed language generation and change, especially the lexical semantic generation and change of signed language. It also shows that the lexical semantic development and change of signed language bear certain motivationality but not arbitrariness, which can be explained by the extension process of signed language lexical meanings, while such process is on the basis of metonymy and metaphor. This thesis innovatively embarks on comparison and analysis of CSL and ASL lexical semantic generation and change from the cognitive perspectives of iconicity, metaphor, and metonymy, which is different from the research on signed languages from the perspective of the traditional linguistics. Meanwhile, cognitive thinking of human being is combined with signed language vocabulary to expound the differences among the thinking modes of CSL and ASL. Finally, the main values of this study are put forward in this thesis, that is, the enlightenment, application and relevant suggestions of this contrastive study on CSL and ASL with the purpose of facilitating the process of CSL research and promoting the establishment of CSL language status. In the light of the above, the results of the study have the applicatory and theoretical value on CSL research and the learning and teaching of signed language interpretation.