A Study On Names Of Residential Areas In Chengdu

Geographical names come into being with the development of human society.To some extent,Geographical names record the natural geographical features and social life of the named place,which is an effective way for people to understand the local history and culture.As proper names created by human beings for those specific geographical areas,geographical names are also the products of human mental activity,reflecting the way of thinking.At present,linguists have noticed the connection between the geographical names and the objective world,and have applied knowledge of structural linguistics,sociolinguistics and cultural linguistics to study geographical names.From my point of view,geographical names are the products of human interaction with the objective world,so the research can’t completely reveal the characteristics of geographical names if we only pay attention to the impacts of the objective world,ignoring the subjective effects of human.Therefore,this paper,which takes names of residential areas in Chengdu as the research object and cognitive linguistics as the theoretical basis,attempts to reveal the subjective factors involved in the names of residential areas in Chengdu based on the description of the names of residential areas in Chengdu.This paper consists of six parts.The first part briefly presents the historical and geographical profiles of Chengdu,and describes research object,research theory,the literature review of studies on geographical names and so on.The second part describes the structures of names of residential areas in Chengdu and make a cognitive analysis of the word structure.The third part classifies the naming motivation of specific names and sorts out generic names,and discusses the meaning of some generic names.The fourth part establishes ECRP on the basis of Event-domain Cognitive model,Cognitive Reference Point and Metaphtonymy,which has been used to explain the naming mechanism of the names of residential areas in Chengdu.The fifth part makes a cognitive analysis of some toponymy phenomena in the names of residential areas in chengdu,including overlaping names,dialect names and generic term specialization.The sixth part briefly reviews the whole paper and summarizes the shortcomings of the research in the hope of further improvement in the future.