A Contrastive Study Of Semantic Fuzziness Between Chinese And English Poetic Discourses

Poetry is one of the most important and complicated literary genres, and poeticlanguage has its unique features in many ways. As a general and fundamental natureof different languages around the world, semantic fuzziness is bound to have an effecton poetic language. The traditional studies of poetry mainly focus on aspects ofliterature or aesthetics but few from cognitive linguistics, and the contrastive researchbetween Chinese and English poetic language from the perspective of semanticfuzziness is still a new perspective.Early in4thcentury B.C, ancient Greek philosophers explored the fuzziness oflanguage. But until the early20thcentury, people began to realize and research thistopic. The Fuzzy Set Theory proposed by Zadeh in1965was regarded as the birth offuzzy theory. The cognitive linguistics believes that the language is the product ofhuman cognitive activities, and semantics is not just the truth condition of objective,but the combination of subjective and objective. Poetic language, as a special art ofliterature, is filled with semantic fuzziness. It is the semantic fuzziness that helps thepoetry to express poets’ perceptions of the objective world and their subjectiveemotions.Under the framework of fuzzy theory and other scholar’s successful researchfindings, this study categorizes and analyzes a large number of corpora of English andChinese poetic discourses from the perspective of cognition. The reason of choosingsemantic fuzziness as the content of comparison is that it is the universal feature ofpoetic language and it has great value of appreciation as well. In the process ofexploring unique functions of semantic fuzziness in poetic language, the culturalbackground and personal characteristics are also taken into consideration.This study mainly deals with the following questions: 1. What are the characteristics of semantic fuzziness presented in Chinese andEnglish poetry？2. What are the similarities and differences of semantic fuzziness in Chinese andEnglish poetic language?3. How semantic fuzziness influence the Chinese and English poetry?The study adopts qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the semanticfuzziness applied in Chinese and English poetries in order to find out the similaritiesand differences. The study suggests that:1. There is abundant fuzzy language in both Chinese and English poetry, whichresults in semantic fuzziness. It reflects in word structure, rhetorical devices andsemantic ambiguity of poetic language.2. The application of semantic fuzziness in Chinese and English poetic discoursehas many similarities because they have similar method of using words, similarfeatures of ambiguity, integrity and concision. They all occupy similar functions ofconveying meanings more efficiently and accurately and share similar aestheticeffects.3. Chinese and English poetry has their typical features in applying semanticfuzziness. Two languages belong to different language systems, which leads to theiruniqueness. These differences are rooted in the different culture background and thethinking way between Chinese and English.