A Study On The Naming Mechanism Of Diseases From The Perspective Of Cognitive Sociolinguistics

Throughout the history of world civilization,disease has been accompanied by human society.The disease names not only condense human’s understanding of their own body structure,but also reflect human’s thinking on the relationships between human,nature and society.With the development of medicine,people’s understanding of disease is deepening and there are myriad studies and discussions about disease names.In addition to discussions from the perspective of medicine,disease names attract grate attention from Linguistics and Sociology.The linguistic investigations into disease names mainly focus on English-Chinese translation of medical terms,rules of word formation and English medical terms teaching.However,the discussion about disease naming mechanisms from the perspective of Cognitive Sociolinguistics lacks theoretical foundation and data supporting.This thesis argues that although metonymy-naming view provides a new theoretical perspective in the research of naming,it still has some defects and cannot explain the naming method involving multiple factors.Based on the analysis of metonymy-naming view,this thesis integrates the concept blending theory and the salience theory into metonymy-naming view,i.e.MCS model,proving it with data,aiming to explore the naming rules of disease names,the cognitive motivations,social and historical factors behind.The data of this thesis are selected from Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease,which construct a mini corpus with 133 entries.Based on the Best Naming Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases proposed by World Health Organization,this thesis makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of disease names from the theoretical perspectives of metonymy-naming view,conceptual blending theory and salience theory.14 naming elements and 26 naming patterns are extracted from data analysis.The results show that the disease names involving a single naming element reflect metonymy-naming view and salience theory,while the disease names concerning the combination of multiple naming elements confirm the conceptual blending theory.At the same time,it can be concluded that disease naming elements are closely related to person’s names,place names,animal names,special substances,age,occupation and other factors.These factors reflect the history of medicine and the social considerations that are involved in the course of disease naming.Theoretically,this thesis discusses the cognitive rules and social factors embodied in disease names from cognitive and social perspectives,which broadens research scope of Cognitive Sociolinguistics.In addition,this thesis enables people to have a deeper understanding of the social and historical factors in disease names,and also increases public awareness of disease prevention.Thus,this thesis has its practical significance to some extent.