Theoretical Study And Design Of Chinese-English Thesaurus From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

The dictionary is a kind of communication tool for learning and using language. Classifications, definitions and examples in dictionaries reveal the complex cognitive process of people's understanding and abstracting the objective world. The semantic network, category, and concepts in the dictionary are all closely related to cognitive linguistics.Dictionary compilation has a really long history of about 3,000 years. However, traditional dictionary compilations pay more attention to the coding and decoding of language, which destroy the relationship among the semantic members in a category and ignore the semantic field of category. Cognitive linguistics holds that meanings are conceptualized and experiential and meanings reflect people's experience and understanding of the world. Categorization, prototype theory, metaphor, image schema, the formation and generative mechanism of concepts all have great significance in guiding the dictionary compilation or lexicography.Thesaurus is a kind of thematic or conceptual dictionary. Compared with the compilation and retrieval of traditional dictionary, thesaurus seeks the most suitable words according to pre-concepts or pre-meanings rather than their pronunciation or morphology. The practice of thesaurus exists in several major languages. However, it is rare in Chinese-English thesaurus.Based on the theory of embodied philosophy and cognitive linguistics, this paper tries to analyze the semantic cohort and construct a semantic network of a Chinese-English thesaurus and then design a model of dictionary compilation under the guide of cognitive linguistic theory. And also we are looking forward to an online electronic dictionary's realization.