A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Olympic Sports Names: Cognitive And Functional Perspectives

Sports have drawn great attention since ancient times due to their closerelationship with people’s daily life. As a grand gathering aiming at promotingcultural exchange, Olympic Games are constituted of more than300events anddisciplines. People learn about the world and describe the world through personalexperience. Names of sports events not only reflect the cognitive process of society bypeople from different nations but also give expression to cognitive differencesbetween English and Chinese nations. More and more attention are given by scholarsto sports events names while they study various sports. English and Chinese Olympicsports names are mainly composed of nouns, compounding nouns and noun phrases.Those names are closely related with human cognition as well as the dynamicconversion among three grammatical categories of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Adeep research of conversion among different parts-of-speech has great significance tounderstanding the nature of language and revealing rules of human cognition.This thesis studies the26sports and302disciplines of London SummerOlympic Games and learns from authentic and new achievements from the field ofcognitive grammar, functional grammar, categorization and nominalization. Methodsof contrastive analysis, combination of introspection and empirical research andcombination of system and examples are adopted in this paper. The author aims toexplore the significance and effect of metaphor, metonymy and nominalization toEnglish and Chinese sports names by studying them from both cognitive andfunctional perspectives. The choice of corpus is quite important for the reliability ofresearch. To ensure naturality and authority of data, the Corpus of ContemporaryAmerican English (COCA) and corpus of Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU (CCL)are used in this study.Combined with related theories of cognitive grammar and systematic functionalgrammar, this paper puts forward a cognitive-functional model in studying Olympicsports names, which provides insights for contrastive analysis of metaphorical,metonymic and nominal phenomena in E-C sports names. The results show that some sports names in English have a similar way in word formation with their counterpartsin Chinese while others different. English sports names are mainly formed throughderivation and compounding, while Chinese ones usually combine characters withdifferent part-of-speech into verb-object construction or attributive construction suchas “推铅球” and “双杠”. Among the same sport, Chinese names are more distinctivethan English names for that most of the names from the same category end up withthe same syllables. This phenomenon is not so often seen in English. It is generallyconsidered that the relationship between word form and word meaning is arbitrary, butdifferent meanings of one word (polysemy) is largely induced. In Chinese language,names of a lot of sports especially ball games designate not only the sport itself butalso equipment of this sport. A typical example is “足球” which refers football gameas well as the ball used in football. So are “�'乓球” and “羽毛球”. Metonymy playsan important role in the extension of meaning. In English, however, all the other ballgames except “football” and “basketball” adopt two different words to designate sportand the ball which it uses. In English and Chinese Olympic sports names, words fromother fields are metaphorically or metonymically used to designate sports nameswhich reflect the similarities of people from different nations in cognizing humanexperience. A typical example is “蝶泳” and “butterfly”.Nominalization is both the most important way in realizing grammaticalmetaphor, and an important origin of quite a number of English and Chinese Olympicsports names. Grammatical metaphor is the incongruent realization of grammar andreality, namely it is the transference between language units from differentgrammatical domains. Through contrastive analysis, I conclude that English Olympicsports names not only tend to be nominalized than Chinese sports names but also havevarious types of nominalization including verb-noun nominalization andadjective-noun nominalization, while Chinese sports names have merely verb-nounnominalization. V-ing construction is productive and its meaning is predictable, whileChinese nominalized words lack of morphological marks and have lower frequency ofnominalization than English ones. According to a contrastive analysis of COCA andCCL, the frequency of occurrence of English nominalized sports names is about three times the frequency of Chinese nominalized sports names. According to a contrastiveanalysis of textual functions of sports names, nominalized sports in both languages aremainly distributed in newspapers and magazines which are attributed to the timelycharacteristics of sports events that attract all people’s attention. Apart from thisreason, nominalized words comply with the concise and objective characteristics ofnewspapers and magazines.