A Contrastive Study Of Trans-categorization Of Chinese And English Basic Taste Words

With a long history of food culture, Chinese nation attaches great importance to“Taste” feeling. “Taste” as the most common phenomenon in nature, is the most basic and one of the most important perceptions in human cognition. The understanding and research of taste has yielded profound achievements in biology, physiology,psychology, medicine and other areas. A folk saying goes, food is the first thing for people, while taste is the first thing for food, which illustrated the importance of “taste“in human being’s life. Different language cultures have different “taste”categorization, which widely differ the number of basic taste words accordingly.Taste words as a special clustering in vocabulary system, recorded the knowledge and experience of “taste” with their unique ways. Perception of taste is one of human instincts. Human perception of taste is basically the same, but the understanding and usage of taste symbols are by no means alike. The study of the national taste words will help to see the characteristics of Chinese thinking patterns.Through a contrastive study of basic taste words in Chinese and English two languages, it also helps to understand the connections between Chinese and western language thinking pattern and culture.The origin of Chinese basic taste words can be traced back to the Ancient classical document The Canon of Medicine,which expounded the relationship between the five basic tastes words“酸苦甘辛�'�”with our organs.As the language and human being’s life evolved,now we are tend to use“酸苦甜辣�'�”as the five basic taste words and regard them as the modal variants of the original ones.In this paper,we will mainly take the basic taste words as the research object.Based on the synchronic study and definition of Modern Chinese,our study guided with“酸甜苦辣�'�”,and choose English“Sour”,“Sweet”,“Bitter”,“Spicy”and“Salty”correspondingly as the study objects and make a contrastive analysis of trans-categorization phenomenon between Chinese and English basic taste words.Over the past decades, the studies of basic taste words with foreign researchers have been dedicated to food and beverage, tourism and other related industries, and rarely from a linguistic perspective. In recent years, more and more domestic scholars began to pay attention to the taste words study, which launched multifaceted, multiangled researches and the results are quite fruitful. Domestic scholars mainly contrast the Chinese and English basic taste words from the perspective of semantics, grammar,culture, aesthetics, cognitive and metaphor, which mostly are focused on the “system”,rather from the “instance” perspective of their practical application in discourse. So far, the class shift study of English and Chinese basic taste words has not been aroused enough attentions. In academia, there are few people show big interested in comparative study on cognitive mechanism with semantic trans-categorization of Chinese and English basic taste words as well.This thesis abides by description principle of cognitive semantics with a combination of system and instances and applies with the theoretical framework of categorization, trans-categorization and sub-categorization. Based on the instances collected from corpora, this paper firstly analyzed the difference of actual language use between Chinese and English basic taste terms from cognitive and systematic perspective and etc. Then this thesis adopted metaphorical theories of cognitive semantics discussing the differences of semantic transference between Chinese and English basic taste terms. It aims to reveal the differences of trans-categorization phenomenon of basic taste terms within two different language system. The Methodologies this paper adopted are: Contrastive Analysis, Method of a combination of introspection and empirical study and Method of systematic observation with reference to text. All the data and instances are collected from domestic and foreign large-scale authority corpus. One is the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) and the other one is Peking University’s Corpus of the Chinese Language(CCL). In CCL, this paper combined with both ancient Chinese vocabularies and modern Chinese vocabularies, mainly focus on the modern one.This paper expounds the initial state of basic taste terms should be nouns. This deduction is based on the children’ language acquiring order. People initially knowthe entity then move to learn the properties and progress. In the aspect of grammar,people acquire nouns first, learn verbs and adjectives after noun. For both Chinese and English, people are likely to take basic taste terms as adjective caused by an illusion that due to long-period usage of them. This deduction can also find basement and supports from The Canon of Medicine and demonstrated in the instances collected from the two authentic corpus.The research results show that the degree of class shift frequency(verbalization)of basic taste words in Chinese is generally higher than that of English basic taste words. There are many factors that cause the difference of basic color words between English and Chinese. In English content words, there is a small cross among English nouns, verbs and adjectives; While in terms of notional words in Chinese, noun contains verbs, verbs contain adjectives. Relationship between Chinese Nouns and verbs are mutually inclusive. Another reason for the higher degree of class shift frequency in Chinese is that Chinese people tend to focus more on process, details,metaphorization and visualization. While English pay more attentions on the conceptualization, generalization and abstraction. Therefore, in terms of contrast with English, the degree of class shift frequency of basic taste words in Chinese is relatively high. From a macro perspective, the basic taste words in Chinese are highly transferred due to the historical and cultural reasons.At last, this paper made a contrastive study of the semantic trans-categorization of basic taste words in English and Chinese, investigated the differences of metaphorical attribute transference and the metaphorical process transference in Chinese and English basic taste words respectively. The vast majority of the semantic transference of English basic taste words is due to the role of metonymy mechanism,while the semantic transference of Chinese language is under the mechanism of metonymy and metaphor together.