A Study On Plant Word Concept Frames In Chinese And English

As linguistic representation based on people's cognition of plant in the external world, compared with other word categories, plant word has its outstanding peculiarities and has been paid much attention to. This thesis aims to discover the characteristics of linguistic representations of concepts within the plant word concept frames and the rules of conceptual change and shift in plant words by analyzing, inducing and introspecting English and Chinese plant words with the help of frame semantics and the prototype theory from a cognitive linguistic perspective.This thesis focuses on uncovering the characteristics of linguistic representations of concepts within the plant word concept frames and the rules of conceptual change and shift in plant words. In order to find out the characteristics of linguistic representations of concepts within plant word concept frames, we simulate the general plant word concept frame through analysis, induction and introspection of plant words collected from英汉大词典and汉语大词典as a starting point. The general Chinese plant word concept frame is similar to that of English plant word. However, concept frame is a dynamic system and can be changed or extended by different experiences, cognitive goals and cultural background knowledge. Take Chinese and English plant words for instance. A conclusion is drawn that the general concept frame is applicable to most Chinese and English plant words but there are still some Chinese and English plant words having concept frames with different concepts on the second level and even more different concepts as the general concept frame is extended to the third or more subordinate level, and the main cause is the different subjective and objective cultures between Chinese and English people. The study on the characteristics of linguistic representations of concepts within the general plant word concept frame focuses on the formational features of linguistic representations of concepts within the frames. There are four kinds of linguistic expressions for concepts within the frame: monomorphemic word, derivative, compound and phrase. A conclusion is reached that compounding, shifting and affixation are the most active ways to create linguistic representations of concepts within the plant word concept frames both in English and Chinese. Compounding is more important in Chinese than in English, while shifting and affixation are obviously more important in English than in Chinese and the linguistic representations of concepts within the frames prove that the more attention a concept receives, the higher the level of the lexicalization of the concept is.The analyses of the semantic structure and semantic change of Chinese and English polysemous plant words are made from a prototype aspect and we assume metaphor and metonymy are the main cognitive devices. Firstly, only those linguistic representations of concepts within the frames paid much attention to by human beings carry abundant extended meanings, while those paid little attention to seldom carry extended meanings. Secondly, the extended meanings of plant words formed by metonymy are much more than those formed by metaphor; what's more, most of those extended meanings formed by metaphor are conceptually based on a certain metonymy, which is close to the experiential basis of the metaphor. Again, that metonymy is a more fundamental way of cognition than metaphor is proved. Thirdly, there are some similarities and differences between the extended meanings of Chinese and English plant words. Similar experience and common cognitive devices mainly contribute to the similarities and the differences are due to the different subjective and objective cultures between Chinese and English people.This thesis makes a tentative study of English and Chinese plant word concept frames from a cognitive angle and finds out experience as well as cultural background is the basis of plant concepts and linguistic representations of them. Theoretically, we try to expand Fillmore's frame semantics to be a semantic model of generating and understanding; practically, the frame we simulate may help people better understand the effects of human experience, social culture and cognitive mechanisms on the semantic change and shift and better understand the principles for lexical combination and integration.