A Comparative Study Of Semantic Fuzziness In English And Chinese Numerals

Fuzziness is one of the intrinsic attributes in natural language and has been always a common phenomenon in interpersonal communications.In English and Chinese daily communications and literary works,some numerals that express the meaning of exact quantity may be semantically ambiguous and express the meaning of fuzzy quantity.There are considerable studies on numeral fuzziness,but systematic analysis of the similarities and differences of semantic fuzziness of English and Chinese numerals is still inadequate and needs to be perfected.For a long time,domestic studies of English and Chinese numeral fuzziness mainly discuss the issue from the perspective of one language and lack a detailed explanation about the reasons for the differences.The differences are caused by many factors and most of studies attribute the differences to cultural factors and cognitive differences.In recent years,a few studies are done about semantic fuzziness of English and Chinese numerals.Therefore,a comparative study of semantic fuzziness on English and Chinese numerals is worthwhile to be done.This thesis discusses and supplements the classification of English and Chinese fuzzy numerals based on Channell's classification of fuzzy quantities.Based on the two corpora(BNC&CCL),this thesis involves three research methods.Combining descriptive research and explanatory research,this thesis tries to analyze data from BNC and CCL.With the method of qualitative and quantitative research,this thesis discusses the semantic fuzziness in English and Chinese numerals in order to find out the characteristics of semantic fuzziness of English and Chinese numerals,similarities and differences between English and Chinese numerals and the reasons for them.Meanwhile,this thesis will adopt contrastive analysis to compare the similarities and differences of semantic fuzziness in English and Chinese numerals.This thesis tries to solve the following questions:1.What are the characteristics of semantic fuzziness of Chinese numerals?2.What are the characteristics of semantic fuzziness of English numerals?3.What are the similarities and differences of semantic fuzziness in English and Chinese numerals and what are the reasons for the differences?Major finding of this thesis are as follows:To the first question,there are four types of semantic fuzziness in Chinese numerals.The characteristics of semantic fuzziness of Chinese numerals are various collocations and complicated structures.To the second question,there are also four types of semantics fuzziness in English numerals.The characteristics of semantic fuzziness of English numerals are various collocations and complicated structures.To the last question,partial correspondence and relative difference exist in the semantic fuzziness of English and Chinese numerals.The differences reflects in three aspects:same image but different number,different image but same number and different image and number.Both English and Chinese numerals have flexible collocations.The semantic fuzziness of English and Chinese numerals have differences because they belong to different language systems.The different cultural background and cognitive basis cause the differences of semantic fuzziness of English and Chinese numerals.In a word,this thesis makes a comparative study on English and Chinese fuzzy numerals,discusses the semantic fuzziness in English and Chinese numerals and finds out the characteristics of semantic fuzziness in English and Chinese numerals.And this study helps English and Chinese learners to understand the language fuzziness better.Besides,it also provides implications for second language teaching and English and Chinese translation.