| Flowers are the generic name of plants used for ornamental purposes.Cultivating flowers has many advantages for human beings: beautifying the environment,increasing the pleasure of life,promoting human health,increasing economic benefits.With the deepening of economic globalization,the exchange of flowers among countries is becoming more frequent.Flowers are not only the symbol of culture,but also the driving force of economic development.Data show that Chinese and Western flower research works are mainly in the field of agricultural science and technology,while linguistic research works account for only 0.13% of the total.In the study of flowers,a large number of works focus on the cultural meaning and translation strategies of flower names.Linguistic studies mainly focus on the meaning domains of flower words as source domains,rather than as target domains.Therefore,it is necessary to study the pre-modifiers of sub-categorical flower terms in English and Chinese with contrastive analysis,introspective and empirical methods from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and systemic functional linguistics.The theoretical value of this study lies in expanding the application scope of crosscategory theory and applying it to flower science vocabulary research,which is conducive to the localization of cognitive metaphor theory and grammatical metaphor theory.The practical significance is to help us name other things scientifically and to improve our inter-cultural communication.This thesis focuses on the following three questions to study 1540 English sub-categorical flower terms and 1540 Chinese subcategorical flower terms in Flowers Dictionary.(1)What are the similarities and differences of English and Chinese subcategorical flower terms in the word form?(2)What are the similarities and differences of English and Chinese subcategorical flower terms in the semantic trans-categorization?(3)What are the similarities and differences of English and Chinese subcategorical flower terms in the grammatical trans-categorization?Through the study,this thesis finds that the similarities and differences between English and Chinese sub-categorical flower terms lie in three aspects,and the reasons are analyzed.The thesis also analyses how trans-categorization theory serves as a deepseated mechanism to promote lexical construction and thus influence coherence and cohesion of text.In terms of word form,all compound words in English and Chinese subcategorical flower terms take the form of“modifier+noun”structure,i.e.,“retrograde structure”(Jin Lixin,2000),such as???????????????????????,baby rose,bird cherry,blood flower,cotton rose,feather cactus,holly fern,night jessamine.Because English and Chinese flower terms adhere to economic principles on word formation.It also shows that human beings have the same physiological structure and cognitive experience.Differences are:(1)the degree of lexicalization of simple words in English sub-categorical flower terms is higher than that of Chinese sub-categorical flower terms;(2)A large number of affixes and inflectional changes can be seen in English sub-categorical flower terms.However,there is no inflectional change in Chinese,only a few derivative affixes.The reasons of differences are as follows:Chinese thinking pays attention to the whole,while English thinking pays attention to the parts.Chinese belongs to analytic language whose word formation is mainly by word-order and functional words;English,as a part of synthetic language,word formation depends on morphological changes.With regard to semantic trans-categorization,statistics show that English and Chinese sub-categorical flower terms basically have the same source domains.The first six are animals,tools,colors,phenomena,places,and human.The last five are number,minerals,gods,chemicals and food.It shows that both English and Chinese pay attention to the use of metaphorical thinking to increase the connotation of flower words.Some source domains rank the top six because they are closely related to the shapes,characteristics,color,growing environment of flowers and human beings.Differences and reasons in semantic transference:(1)China,with a complex geographical environment and diverse climate,is the origin of many flowers;while flowers and plants in the West are mostly from other countries.As a result,the number of English sub-categorical flower terms with pre-modifiers from source domain of places is far bigger than that in Chinese.(2)As an ideographic language,Chinese pays more attention to the use of metaphorical thinking to increase the connotation of flowers in order to facilitate memory,so the total proportion of semantic trans-categorization of Chinese sub-categorical flower terms is larger than that of English.(3)The specific contents of each source domain are different because of the different linguistic families and cultural backgrounds of English and Chinese nationalities.“Dragon and Phoenix culture,traditional Chinese medicine culture,Confucian culture and Taoist Yin-yang and Five Elements culture,collectivism,historical allusions” in China and “ancient Greek and Roman culture and individualism” in the West are the reasons for the different contents.The end of this section briefly analyzes that semantic trans-categorization,as a deep mechanism,maps many characteristics from source domain to target domain,which can simplify textual structure and close semantic relations of sentences,thus promoting textual coherence.In grammatical trans-categorization aspect,the research finds that adjectivisation exists in pre-modifiers of sub-categorical flower terms in both English and Chinese.The pre-modifiers of sub-categorical flower terms in English and Chinese mainly derive from the semantic function of“entity”,that is,nouns used as adjectives account for the majority of the total,such as????????????????????????????????????,ballon flower,banana shrub,bear cherry,bottle palm,dagger fern,flame vine,rock jasmine.Adjectivisation is widely used because it can increase information density and simplify vocabulary structure.The reason why nouns are used as adjectives is that they are objective,scientific and rigorous.Nouns make it possible for sub-categorical flower terms to be classified further.However,the total number of grammatical trans-categorization of Chinese subcategorical flower terms and the number of branches is all bigger than that of English.The number of verbs with the semantic function of “process” in the pre-modifier of Chinese sub-categorical flower terms is quite large,while no such usage of grammatical trans-categorization in English has been found in this dictonary.The reason is that English pays attention to hypotaxis,while Chinese pays attention to parataxis.Verbs and adjectives can transform reciprocally by adding affixes.The functions and semantics of Chinese parts of speech are different,but they change invisibly.The phenomenon that conjunctions with the semantic function of “relator” are used as adjectives doesn't exist because conjunctions are applicable to text rather than scientific terms.For the importance of environment to flowers,adverbs with semantic function of “circumstance” are used as adjectives exist in both English and Chinese.The reason why in Chinese it is slightly more than that of English is that adverbs can be transformed into adjectives in English.However,there are still many grammatical transcategorization phenomena in pre-modifiers of English sub-categorical flower terms in order to avoid semantic deviation.Finally,as a deep grammatical mechanism,grammatical trans-categorization facilitates theme-rheme change and information flow through lexical construction,thus promoting textual cohesion. |
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