A Contrastive Study On The Semantic Field Of Commonly Used Hand-action Verbs Between Chinese And English

As an integral part of human body,hands play an important role in the existence and development of human beings.In any given language,words related to hands constitute a large semantic field,in which the hand-action verb is a major category.Many hand-action verbs become the commonly used words due to their close relationship with human's life.A semantic field groups meaning-related words together,which will benefit our better understanding and differentiation of words.Therefore,a contrastive study on the semantic field of hand-action verbs will deepen the comprehension of different languages.However,previous studies mainly focus on one hand-action verb or contrastive analysis between the ancient and modern time.A systematic analysis of hand-action verbs between Chinese and English is hardly seen.Thus,this thesis will conduct a contrastive study on the semantic field of hand-action verbs between the two languages,with an aim to find out the similarities and distinctions of the hand-action semantic field in two languages.This thesis also makes an attempt to give the major reasons for the findings from the view of thought,culture and society.The Brown Corpus and BLI Corpus are selected and their foregoing 3000 words are the research scope,where the research object,commonly used hand-action verbs as well as examples occur.Then,this thesis makes an reference to the explanations in dictionary to obtain an accurate result.Based on the traditional componential analysis,this thesis borrows the semantic component model analysis proposed by Fu Huaiqing and makes a combination of the two methods in order to have a better analysis of hand-action verbs.From the analysis,several results have been found.The whole semantic field of hand-action verbs in both Chinese and English can be analyzed into five sub-fields,which can be further separated into smaller fields until all the verbs are included.Different semantic components stay in a certain field where they are meaning-related and will define each other.The number of the commonly used hand-action verbs in Chinese is slightly more than that in English,both in the whole semantic field and in each smaller semantic field.Besides,it is found that the Chinese verbs are more inclined to be grouped together to form even smaller semantic fields.However,generally speaking,the English hand-action verbs have more abundant meanings than the Chinese hand-action verbs which show less differences in their semantic components.The Chinese hand-action verbs are more likely to show its meaning in the semantic components including the instrument,instrument state and patient while the English hand-action verbs show preferences for the semantic components of intensity and speed of force as well as mental states.In other words,different semantic components are encoded in the hand-action verbs in different degrees in Chinese and English.The reasons for the similarities and differences of the hand-action semantic fields between Chinese and English are also discussed in this thesis.They can be well explained by the relationships between language and the thinking patterns,culture as well as society.