A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of Taste Words In English And Chinese

Sense of taste is one of the most basic experiences of human beings.As a basic vocabulary for describing human's taste perception,taste words are common in both English and Chinese,and they are an important component of the lexical system.Therefore,taste words are an important topic in linguistic research.However,previous studies mostly focus on the semantic description of taste words,and lack a understanding mechanism for taste words and a systematic explanation for the meaning generation of taste words.There is no detailed cognitive interpretation for meaning generation of taste words.Besides,there are few systematic contrastive studies of taste words in English and Chinese.Based on previous scholars' definition for taste words from the perspective of linguistics,this thesis focuses on three pairs of basic taste words “sour/?,sweet/?,and bitter/?” in English and Chinese as the research objects and makes a synchronic contrastive study on the linguistic features and meaning generation of taste words in English and Chinese under the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory and the conceptual blending theory.And this thesis mainly adopts qualitative research method to make a comprehensive and systematic explanation for the meaning generation of taste words in English and Chinese from the perspective of cognition in order to explore the cognitive motivation andcultural origin that cause the similarities and differences of meaning generation of taste words in English and Chinese.Abundant language examples in this thesis are mainly taken from the British National Corpus(BNC)and CCL corpus.Through the study for the selected three pairs of basic taste words in English and Chinese,this thesis has three major findings as follows:(1)According to the salient features of meaning,taste words in English and Chinese can be classified into four types,namely,taste words with taste features,taste words with emotion features of people,taste words with abstract features of things and taste words with non-taste physiology features.And the extended meanings of English and Chinese taste words are mainly reflected in the last three types.The semantic features of taste words in English and Chinese includes polysemy,emotionality,fuzziness and nationality.Collocation of taste words in English and Chinese is extensive,but Chinese taste words have stronger collocation ability,more flexible collocation and show free expression in grammar.(2)Meaning generation of taste words in English and Chinese is the product of human's conceptualization.Meanings of taste words with emotion features of people and meanings of taste words with abstract features of things are generated by the conceptual metaphor mechanism while meanings of taste words with non-taste physiology features are generated by the conceptual blending mechanism.Through comparison,it is foundthat there are similarities and differences in meaning generation of taste words in English and Chinese.English and Chinese taste words generate the same meanings by mapping from the same taste source domain to the same conceptual target domain.However,they will also present different extended meanings,which means there are also particularities in commonness.Also,English and Chinese taste words will generate different meanings by mapping from the same taste source domain to different target domains,resulting in projection vacancies.(3)There are similarities in meaning generation of English and Chinese taste words because human beings share the common physiological basis,the same physical experience and similar cognitive mechanism.However,different cultural backgrounds and thinking modes in English and Chinese lead to the differences in meaning generation of English and Chinese taste words.Therefore,meaning generation of taste words in English and Chinese has the universality in experience and cognition and has the differences in culture and thinking.This thesis makes a systematic contrast analysis of taste words in English and Chinese from the perspective of cognition,and it reveals the cognitive motivation and cultural origin that cause the similarities and differences in meaning generation of taste words in English and Chinese,which not only confirms the powerful explanatory power of cognitive linguistics theory but also provides certain reference for English teachingand cross-cultural communication.