Geographical names are the special names given by people to geographical entities with specific orientation and geographical scope,and the names of physical geographical entities are an important part of them.Based on the basic situation of rivers and lakes in the first national water census in 2012,this paper selects a total of6480 rivers with a basin area of 50km~2or more in four provincial-level administrative regions in southwest China(Yunnan Province,Sichuan Province,Guizhou Province and Chongqing Municipality)as the basic data,and takes the"Dictionary of the Geographical Names of the People’s Republic of China,Volume IV","Bashu River Dictionary"and"Chinese Water System Dictionary"as the main tool reference books,and mainly uses statistical methods and language comparison methods to quantitatively analyze the data.From the perspective of linguistics,a special study of river names in southwest China was conducted.As a proper noun in language,place names are living fossils of human history,so this paper divides the content of this paper into four parts from the perspective of linguistic research.The first part is an introduction,which mainly explains the research status,research significance,research methods,research scope,source and processing of materials,geographical characteristics of southwest China and river name characteristics.The second part mainly discusses the structural forms of river names in southwest China,and explains the structure of river names in Chinese and ethnic minority languages in southwest China from the aspects of phonetic structure and morphological structure,and concludes that the names of rivers in ethnic minority languages can be roughly divided into four types:"The front is consistent","The back is consistent","mixed"and"additional".The third part is the problems existing in the translation of river names of ethnic minorities in southwest China,and the description and analysis of the current language facts show that there are problems such as"one multiple translation","multiple one translation","common name transliteration cannot be expressed",and"irregular translation of Chinese character names"in the translation process.The fourth part discusses the naming rationale of river names in southwest China,which is divided into three categories:"descriptive river names","narrative river names"and"voluntary river names",and finds that they are similar to the core principles of"reality-cognition-language"in cognitive linguistics through the etymology of geographical names and the classification of naming reasons,and compare and analyze them with the help of"naming metonymy view".At the same time,the"Le win’s human behavior formula B=f(P,E)"and"attribution theory"are used to infer and explain the cause of the action from the perspective of psychological organizational behavior,and the naming mechanism of"need-motivation-behavior"is deduced. |