A Contrastive Study Of Classifier-Emotion Noun Collocation Between English And Chinese From The Cognitive Perspective

The modern mandarin Chinese is a classifier language in which the classifier is a part of speech with flexible usages. In contrast, English is singularity- plurality language in which the classifier is not set as a part of speech by the traditional grammar. However, the constructions with the function of the classifier are abundant in English and even constitute a large system.Emotion is a spiritual experience peculiar to human beings, which plays a very important role in human beings' spiritual and social lives. Nowadays, more and more linguists pay attention to the emotion nouns which refer directly to the emotion and the collocation of emotion nouns. Although the classifier's main function is to count specific nouns, it also collocates with the emotion nouns to modify them. It is noteworthy that the classifier- emotion noun collocations abound in both English and Chinese.Under the light of the theory of conceptual metaphor and Theory of Boundedness and Unboundedness, this paper make a systematic and contrastive study of the classifier- emotion noun collocations in English and Chinese from the semantic and syntactic aspects based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) and the corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics Peking University(CCL). In the end, this paper achieved three findings. Firstly, there are some similarities about the classifier- emotion noun collocations in English and Chinese. In the semantic aspect, in English and Chinese, several shape classifiers and the species classifiers are employed to collocate with emotion nouns. In syntactic aspect, this collocation appear in the similar syntactic construction—existential sentences. Secondly, there are some differences about the classifier- emotion noun collocations in English and Chinese. In semantic aspect, human organ classifiers and the classifier denoting an equal portion of the whole are adopted to modify the emotion nouns in Chinese. However, in contrast to the Chinese, English have many more classifiers to describe the emotion nouns. In syntactic aspect, the collocation appears in different syntactic constructions: the verb- directional constructions in Chinese and the in/ with construction in English.This paper makes a thorough study of the classifier- emotion noun collocation, in the hope to contribute to the studies about classifiers and emotion nouns, the relative translation and foreign language teaching.