A Contrastive Study Between Chinese And English Proper Nouns Based On Decategorization Theory

Language,just like anything developing,is a dynamic process of continuous development of innovation,which makes progress by keeping balance and breaking the balance constantly.This will inevitably appear more novel language phenomenon to make up the gap between cognitive concepts and language expression.Humans use their cognitive abilities,in one way or another,to reprocess and utilize the language resources existed,it has reflect the innovation of both language and human cognition,The decategorization is vivid embodiment of the language development.Decategorization refers a process that a member of a category loss of some features or functions within this category,and regain some new functions and characters from other catagories.Study shows that a common trend of decategorization is found in members of the nouns category in both Chinese and English,distributing differently according to the features they possess.Based on decategorization theory,we,from the perspective of proper nouns and common nouns,comparatively analyze Chinese and English nouns decategorization showed in semantic and function.It reveals a cyclic trend that contains categorization?decategorization?recategorization….And decategorization plays an important role,which both are the result of language development and the way of language innovation.During this process,language entities is gradually varied,not mutational.decategorization theory provides a new outlook for the contrastive studies of English and Chinese nouns,and a more reasonable explanationfor “irregular” language phenomenons.This thesis also discuss the cognitive mechanism worked in this decategorization process.It shows that metonymy perspectives and subjectivizatinon are the main mechanism to enrich the meaning of the word,which conforms with the laws of the language and the principles of language economy.In a word,the nouns decategorization not only shows the source of language development,but also reflect human cognitive mode.This thesis is composed of five chapters structured as follows: Introduction provides a brief introduction to the background,purpose and significance of the present study;Chapter 1 gives a general definition of categorization theory and decategorization theory,Chapter 2 introduces some nouns in English and Chinese,which provides a basis for discussing the decategorization trend and adopts decategorization theory to explain the contrastive results,and Chapter 3 discusses the laws that is metonymy worked in English and Chinese nouns categories;Chapter 4 is a conclusion of this thesis,in which the major findings are summarized and the limitations of the present study are also pointed out.