A Contrastive Study Of Core Nouns In English And Chinese "Path"

English and Chinese are two entirely different languages. In more than 20 years, linguistic researchers have been working hard on the differences between the two languages from voice, words, collocations, word-formation, cultural characteristics and the teaching methods. But these researches mainly focus on synchronic comparisons, such as principle of words-formation, internal structure of language, semantic relationship and word motivation. They hardly mentioned the diachronic comparisons of word-meanings and various use of polysemous words. In other words, polyseme may mean and act differently in different sentences without any form changing. According to compared linguistics theories and with the help of online corpus, the Paper tried to make a deep and detailed comparison between Chinese “road” words(lu, dao, tu, jing, lujing, daolu,tujing), which have long history and rich meanings, and English “road” words(road, way, path, route, approach) from diachronic and synchronic aspects. By comparing and analyzing the differences between Chinese and English “road” words on semantic change in different periods of time, the coexistence of multiple meanings, and the flexible use of words on pragmatic aspect, the paper summarized some helpful principles to provide learning advises for both English and Chinese learners.