A Study On Restaurant Names In Chengdu From The Perspective Of Qualia Structure And Image Schema

Nowadays restaurant names have attracted increasing attention and interest in linguistic research.Most previous researches on restaurant names are conducted to describe and conclude the language phenomena,but there are few researches on the naming mechanisms of restaurant names from the cognitive perspective.The researches about restaurant names in many other cities have been conducted;However,little attention has been paid to the restaurant names in Chengdu,the gastronomy city of the nation.Moreover,there is almost no research on the restaurant names of Chengdu from a cognitive perspective.Therefore,this thesis attempts to discover the naming ways and the underlying naming mechanisms of restaurant names in Chengdu from the cognitive linguistic perspective through qualia structure and image schema.Naming ways of restaurant names in Chengdu are classified into four types according to qualia structure,namely,the constitutive naming way,the formal naming way,the telic naming way and the agentive naming way through qualitative research and statistical analysis methods.Image schema theory is adopted to discover the underlying naming mechanisms of restaurant names in Chengdu,namely the reasons behind the names.The restaurant names are collected from the streets of Chengdu and from Mei Tuan website.The results are as follows: 43% of restaurants are named through the telic naming way.The agentive naming way ranks second among all naming ways,accounting for 23%,while the formal naming and the constitutive naming ways are rarely used to name restaurants.In terms of naming mechanisms,34% of restaurants are named based on link schema which is followed by part-whole schema,accounting for 17% of all names.The rest seven image schemas namely,up-down schema,center-periphery schema,back-front schema,near-far schema,source-path-destination schema,match schema,and object schema can be used to explain about the rest half naming mechanisms of restaurant names in Chengdu.This research is valuable first because it blazes a new trail for the study of restaurant names through qualia structure and image schema.Moreover,as far as practical significance is concerned,the analysis of the naming ways and the underlying naming mechanisms help to provide potential restaurant owners with good suggestions.