A Comparison Of Characteristics Of Cognitive Appellation Nouns In English And Chinese

Address terms can be divided into kinship appellation nouns, communication appellation nouns and cognitive appellation nouns. Cognitive appellation nouns exist in all human languages generally, and they are of even more research value than the other two in the field of sociolinguistics, because the understanding of these nouns involves a complex cognitive process——metaphor, metonymy, or synecdoche, which reflect people's personality, ability, morality, and so on. It is found that there are various social causes as to the formation of cognitive nouns.There are many cognitive appellation nouns in both Chinese and English, and the writer of this thesis tries to compare the characteristics of cognitive appellation nouns in both languages and aims at finding out the differences and similarities by means of quantitative analysis, in order to make some contribution to the address term research and their application in daily life. The cognitive appellation nouns in the paper are picked out from the "Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary" ( published by the Commercial Press andOxford University Press) and the "Modern Chinese Dictionary"(现代汉语字典) (publishedby the Commercial Press), on account of their representation of the standard expressions in both languages. The writer of the thesis made a quantitative analysis based on all the cognitive appellation nouns picked out by the writer in both Chinese and English dictionaries with the conclusion: 1) There is a large number of cognitive appellation nouns in both Chinese and English, but the English language is found to have more than Chinese. 2) There are differences and similarities in the characteristics of either language. 3) Cognitive appellation nouns are used, in most cases, behind people's back and there are more derogatory terms than positive terms. 4) Various social factors lead to the creation of the use of these cognitive appellation nouns. The final goal of this thesis is to have a better understanding of these appellation nouns and hopefully to offer some help to the language users of both Chinese and English.The significance of the paper lies in that the research into cognitive appellation nouns is very pioneering now and the researchers usually concentrate on the researches of cognitiveappellation nouns in different dialects and languages, for the reason that among all theresearches at home and abroad quite a number of them focus on kinship appellation nouns and communication appellation nouns, but few have done much research into cognitive appellation nouns from the aspect of sociolinguistics, though they are of a very great research value. It can be found that there are also many other works on metaphor in rhetorics and address terms, which are quite relevant to cognitive appellation nouns, but none of them has analyzed address terms from the aspect of cognition.