A Contrastive Study Of Chinese Tactile Words And Its English Counterparts

Sensory words as a common category of words,which have appeared frequently in recent years of research.The focus on color words and taste words has led to many other researches on sensory words.As one of the most common human perception abilities,touch is an important means for us to understand the outside world.Tactile words are widely used in daily life.For the research on tactile words,on the one hand,since tactile words are often involved in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.The results of the research will help Chinese-English translation of tactile words to solve related problems in teaching and propose problem-solving teaching.Strategies to make a moderate contribution to the teaching of English and Chinese.On the other hand,the comparative analysis of Chinese and English tactile words is also of great significance for in-depth understanding of Chinese and English culture and language habits.The research achievements on tactile words have been applied to language teaching.Just as ancient poems always say: “There is a breath of spring in the gentle breeze,” which shows the tactile application in literary works.many scholars have explored the field of tactile words on the basis of previous research.We find that there are few related works that analyze tactile words from the perspective of semantics.Compared with color words and taste words,the research on tactile words is generally not dominant,researches on grammatical trans-categorization of basic tactile words is even rarer.There is a certain one-to-one correspondence between Chinese and English tactile words,but the conotation and denotation of meaning are slightly different.In previous research,psychologically,the corresponding range of basic tactile words has been given,including : “slippery,rough,hard,soft,loose,tight,light,heavy”.This paper mainly takes emphasis on “轻、重、软、硬” as the research object,in the contemporary language environment,based on the Corpus of Peking University and Corpus of Contemporary American English,combined with daily usage,making a comparison of these four tactile sensations Word between English and Chinese.The English word “light” corresponds to “ 轻 ” in modern Chinese,and “heavy”corresponds to “重” “软” corresponds to “soft” and “硬” corresponds to “hard”.The theoretical frameworks mainly used in this article include cognitive semantics and Halliday’s theory of systemic functional grammar.On this basis,the author put forward two research questions: 1、What’s the differences of grammatical trans-categorization between Chinese and English tactile expressions and frequency of their verblization;2 、 What’s the difference of semantic trans-categorization between Chinese and English tactile terms.With a comparative research method,a combination of introspection and empirical methods is adopted,and actual examples from the corpus are compared.This paper compares the trans-semantic category and trans-grammatical category phenomenon of basic tactile words in Chinese and English,and finds out the differences of the trans-category phenomenon of tactile words in the two language frameworks.Regarding the selection of corpus,the author use large-scale authoritative corpora at home and abroad.that is American Contemporary English Corpus(COCA)and Peking University Modern Chinese Corpus(CCL).It should be mentioned that in the research of Chinese tactile words,a lot of ancient Chinese are involved.Therefore,The ancient Chinese corpus has also been used.In general,the proportion of the use of the ancient Chinese corpus and the modern Chinese corpus is not much different.This paper narrates that basic tactile words are nouns at first,and points out that this phenomenon is determined by the cognitive order of human beings.Babies understand the world through the substantive objects around them,which are mapped to the brain to form a language.slowly,with the development of the brain,they gradually classify the things around them,and then classify the attributes.Through a contrastive study of Chinese and English basic tactile words trans-grammatical categories,this paper shows that the degree of part-of-speech transformation of Chinese basic tactile words have a high degree of transformation,especially when they are used as verbs.This phenomenon is because the use of most nouns in ancient China covers verbs,and verbs can have the use of adjectives,which can be proved by a large number of ancient classical Chinese writings.In English,the author find that there are prefixes or suffixes between nouns and verbs to make the word a verb,including nouns into adjectives.In other words,in English,the independence between words is strong,and the three part of speeches of words in English have cross-relationships.This is one of the significant difference between Chinese and English.In terms of the grammatical trans-categorization differences of Chinese and English basic tactile words,there are obvious differences in the trans-grammatical phenomena of the two language systems.Among the basic tactile words in English,the word “heavy” is quite special.The degree of verb transformation of this word is almost none,only if it depends on the change of its own affix,that is to say,in English,“heavy”can express the meaning of the word in terms of verbs only with the help of other verbs like(be \get\become heavy)While the other tactile words are more uniform.finally,we find that in terms of the frequency of grammatical trans-categorization,in Chinese We can see that“重” comes first,followed by “轻”,and then is “硬” and “软”respectively;while in English,Because of the particularity of “heavy”,we do not include this word in the frequency ranking of the semantic trans-categories of English tactile words.Then the other three are in the order of “soft”ranking first,“light” ranking second,and “hard” ranking third,that is,“soft”grammatical trans-categorization are used the most frequently,and “hard” is the lowest.As for the difference of the semantic transc-ategorization between English and Chinese,the author analyze and draw conclusions based on the statistics.the author mainly explain the differences between Chinese and English basic tactile words semantic trans-categorization from two aspects.One is the comparison of attribute transferrence in the metaphors of basic tactile words between Chinese and English,and the other is the comparison of process transferrence.attribute transferrence is their common feature,but there are still differences.For example,“soft” and “软”have the extended meaning of “moderate” in their English and Chinese semantic metaphors.The Chinese “轻” and “重” can be extended to contempt and respect,but the corresponding English has no such meaning;In Chinese,the phenomenon of metaphorical process transferrence of the four tactile words“light” and “heavy”,“soft”and “hard” is more common in our daily lives.In English,except for the word“heavy”,the process transferrence of “soft,light,hard” also happens frequently.