A Study Of Body-related Nouns Based On Lexical Semantic Typology

Human cognitive activity originates from physical experience.Body-related nouns in different languages have a long process of word meaning evolution which contains strong rules of word meaning evolution.From the perspective of lexical semantic typology,thirty-one body-related nouns commonly used in Thai,Indonesian,English,Vietnamese and Chinese were selected for cross-linguistic semantic study,and all the meanings of body-related nouns in five languages were quantified layer by layer to observe the similarities and differences of language forms and word meaning extension paths when expressing the same body part in five languages,tease out five languages Shared meanings,four languages Shared meanings,there are three kinds of language meanings,a total of the meanings of two languages,a language unique meanings,And from extension type,extension mechanism,extension clue and semantic category induces five language four dimensions for the segmentation of body-related nouns semantic material different with the same,the way of the five languages have extension rule as five language extension of generality,two to four languages of the extension of law as a relatively common five language extension,peculiar to each language extension path extension for each language specificity.At the same time,the evolution rules of word meaning are explained.The results show that: first,the original meaning of human nouns in the five languages is roughly the same,only Vietnamese and Indonesian have some differences in the scope of reference of word meaning;Secondly,polysemy is the universal feature of the meaning of nouns in five languages.There are a large number of overlapping meanings in five languages,but the strength of extension varies from strong to weak,which are Vietnamese,English,Chinese,Thai and Indonesian in turn.Third,the extension types of the five languages are mostly direct extension,and the extension mechanism is more inclined to metaphor mechanism.This article from the five language of metaphor implied clues as "shape","function","location" and "other",the extended metonymy clues summed up as "part and whole,organ and its behavior,organ and its functional,features and its size",and five related meanings by mark,of five language extension rule are found substantial overlap phenomenon,most features can be classified as general and relatively generality;Fourth,we observe that the relative commonalities of Chinese,Vietnamese and Thai languages in the same language family and language structure type are not obvious,while the relative commonalities of Chinese,Vietnamese and Indian languages are relatively obvious.Chinese and Vietnamese have much in common.Fifth,the distribution characteristics of the categories of five languages are similar,and the meanings of the categories of "non-human entity","behavior activity" and "nature" are concentrated.