A Diachronic Contrastive Analysis Of The Conceptual Structure Of MONEY In Chinese And English From The Perspective Of Cognitive Sociolinguistics

In recent years,diachronic research on the conceptual structure of particular concepts has gained its popularity and embraced multiple perspectives and methodologies.Scholars represented by Glynn have been trying to employ multivariate usage feature analysis to offer falsifiable quantitative analysis of the diachronic variations in conceptual structure.In general,however,the bulk of domestic and foreign diachronic research on particular concepts focus on emotion metaphors,and few of them have delved into the social contexts.In light of this,within the framework of Cognitive Sociolinguistics,this thesis investigates into the concept MONEY,which is strongly associated with social life and economics.The thesis takes the lexemes qian and “money” in Chinese and English respectively to examine diachronic variations in the conceptual structure of MONEY and delve into the underlying socio-cultural driving forces.The conceptual structure of MONEY is indicated by the designatums of qian and “money” and the usage features that they profile.The study aims to address the following three questions:(1)What are the variations in the conceptual structure of MONEY in Chinese and English respectively?(2)What are the social factors underlying these diachronic variations?(3)What are the similarities and differences in the conceptual structure of MONEY between modern Chinese and modern English and what are the driving factors? To deal with these questions,occurrences of qian and “money” are extracted by a ratio of 1: 10 from the CCL corpus and the COHA corpus respectively.Occurrences without substantial contexts are excluded by manual selection.Then,by means of the Conc Sampler,one percent of the whole data,i.e.1821 occurrences from the CCL corpus of the ancient period(from the Zhou Dynasty to the Republican period,as a whole)and the modern period,and 1679 occurrences from the COHA corpus of the three periods(1860s-1900 s,1910s-1950 s,1960s-2010s)are finally obtained.I manually annotate all the occurrences by identifying the designatums of qian and “money” and the usage features they profile.Finally,hierarchical cluster analysis is adopted to investigate how the designatums of qian and “money” group across diverse periods.And correspondence analysis is adopted to examine the variations in usage features between these designatums.Finally,a cross-cultural comparison of the conceptual structure of MONEY between modern Chinese and modern English was conducted.The major findings are presented as follows.Firstly,the conceptual structure of MONEY in Chinese culture has been subject to great changes across the two periods.In the Chinese dataset,five desigantums of qian are found.These include MONEY as CURRENCY,MONEY as FEE,MONEY as WEALTH,MONEY as PAYMENT and MONEY as JOSS PAPER.In the ancient period,the concept MONEY is more likely to be conceptualized as CURRENCY,while WEALTH is another frequent conceptualization of it.In the modern period,WEALTH is the most frequent conceptualization of MONEY,followed by CURRENCY.The conceptualization of MONEY as CURRENCY,FEE and WEALTH has been subject to great changes across the two periods,while that of MONEY as PAYMENT has remained largely constant.The ancient PAYMENT and the modern PAYMENT both emphasize the extrinsic value of money and attach great importance to how things and labor can be valued by it.The ancient CURRENCY and the modern CURRENCY are both regarded as an essential medium of exchange in transactions.The former,however,is characterized with the intrinsic value it exhibits and the capacity to honor and reward people.The ancient FEE,in contrast with its modern counterpart,is strongly correlated with coercive practices.The modern WEALTH groups with the usage features of ‘anxiety’,‘evil’,‘stress’,‘hardship’ and ‘savings’ that distinguish it from the ancient WEALTH.The conceptual structure of MONEY in American culture has been subject to minute changes across the three periods.In the English dataset,four designatums are found,including MONEY as CURRENCY,MONEY as FEE,MONEY as WEALTH,and MONEY as PAYMENT.The conceptualizations of MONEY as CURRENCY,FEE and PAYMENT have remained unchanged over time,while that of MONEY as WEALTH has been subject to minute change.The period 3 WEALTH is more strongly associated with the usage feature ‘social status’.Secondly,significant economic,political,cultural,social and ideological changes underlie these variations are found.The advent of currencies with less intrinsic value such as paper currency,the existence of the system of selling official positions,the absolute imperial power within a feudalist context and constraints on keeping money in ancient China all lead to these variations.Finally,the timocracy may account for variations in the conceptual structure of MONEY in English.Thirdly,certain similarities and differences in the conceptual structure of MONEY between modern Chinese and modern English and the underlying driving forces have been revealed.All these rest heavily upon universal life experience and differences in social mentalities and attitudes towards life between Chinese people and people from English-speaking countries(represented by the Americans).For example,they both use money to facilitate transactions,indicate the value of something,and achieve a better life.This thesis employs multivariate analysis to investigate the diachronic and cross-cultural variations in the conceptual structure of MONEY and the underlying socio-cultural driving forces.On the one hand,it presents the changes in the conceptual structure of MONEY in Chinese and English,contributing to the literature of CL research on the conceptual structure of particular concepts.On the other hand,the feasibility and effectiveness of multivariate analysis in describing conceptual structure is well verified.