A Comparative Study Of Cooking Words Between Chinese And English

The thesis makes a contrastive study of English and Chinese cooking words.Food plays an important part in people’s life whether in western or eastern countries;and the ways of preparing food is a necessity to fulfill the people’s needs. The thesisdescribes and analyzes English and Chinese cooking words by using the method ofcomponential analysis within cooking semantic field. According to theory of semanticfields, he meaning of a word can only be determined by defining it in relation to themeanings of neighboring and contrasting words, the theory is helpful to define lexicalmeanings, and it also provides a basis for conducting contrastive studies on wordsbetween different languages. Componential analysis is a method used to analyze themeaning of a word into its components. So it is helpful to know the sense of a word.The thesis contrasts cooking words in two aspects: degree of lexicalization andcooking semantic fields. Through the analysis the thesis finds that Chinese has ahigher degree of lexicalization than English in cooking semantic field, and the thesisgives some reasons why English and Chinese have different degrees of lexicalizationin cooking semantic field from three facets: living environment, historicaldevelopment and culinary culture.The thesis surveys the conceptual meaning and cultural meaning of these18verbs from the cooking group, focusing on studying cultural connotations andcomparing cultural difference between Chinese verbs and English verbs. Then, thethesis explores the reasons of different connotative meanings of these verbs which aredue to mainly from the perspectives of different natural environment, mode ofthinking and values as well as customs.