A Contrastive Study Of Extremity Chinese And English By Natural Entity Words

This thesis contrasts extremity expressions in Chinese and English by entity wordswith the extremity language theory and category theory, to discover and explain thesimilarities and differences between these two kinds of languages. Whether inChinese or English, most of the words referring to the natural substances themselveshave extreme meanings, and meanwhile one entity word may have multiple extrememeanings in different attributes of different categories. A word that refers to thenatural substance in some attributes may have the same extreme meanings in bothEnglish and Chinese, and also it may have no extreme meanings in some otherattributes either in English or in Chinese.Both Chinese and English entity words that refer to natural celestial haveabundant extreme meanings under different categories, such as category of quantity,time domain, and spatial domain. These words are usually given extreme meaningsunder the social category by the both two cultures. Both Chinese culture and Westernculture aware of marine in the depth domain and space domain polar properties, butthe Chinese people regards ocean as eternal existence, corresponding Chinese wordsare given extreme meanings in time domain. The same thing occurs in the awarenessof mountain, therefore Chinese words that refer to mountains has extreme meaningsbecause of their time attribute, while the corresponding English words do not haveextreme meanings in attribute of time. Chinese and English extreme words that referto animal and plants entities are very different, that is to say, differences are evenmore than similarities, especially words referring plants. Cognitions of the organs ofthe human body have more similarities than dissimilarities in two cultures. Thedissimilarities mainly lie on cognitions of thinking function of heart, which causesChinese words referring to heart having more extreme meanings on function attributethan corresponding English words do.Similarities and dissimilarities between Chinese and English extremity wordsoriginate in that between the two cultures. Cognitions can be various when thesubstantial entity is cognized from different categories or different attributes. The geographical environment, historical and cultural differences lead to differences inChinese and English in the extremity words.The thesis can be divided into five parts. The first part is an introduction. In thesecond part, the author introduces background knowledge on extremity words. Thethird part is a cognitive contrast between Chinese and English cultures aboutsubstantial entity’s extremity attributes. Extremity expressions in these two languagesare contrasted by analyzing cognitive similarities and differences in the fourth part.The last part is the conclusion.