A Cognitive Study Of The Naming Of Chinese Hotels

When people’s cross-regional flow has been stimulating the development of hotel industry, as the primary information transmitted to consumers, good hotel names play particularly important role in hotels’ development. These meaningful names have attracted more and more scholars. Most researchers analyze, describe and interpret brand names from the following aspects:culture, translation, comparison between English and Chinese, language using standard as well as the understanding of names. But the studies on the naming of hotels from the perspective of cognitive linguistics especially knowledge structure and cognitive operation are bare.Based on the theories of knowledge structure and cognitive operation, this paper stimulates the general concept frame of Chinese hotel by means of the language data extensively collected through the network and the streets and then classify these data and analyze them. Of course, hotel concept frame is a dynamic knowledge structure. Along with the change of social environment and the enlargement of human experience, the content of the frame will also be continuously enriched. Different human experience and cultural knowledge will change the components within the frame. Simulating the hotel concept frame is the foundation of exploring the generation mechanism of hotel names. The concrete research process is as follows.First of all, based on human experience, we simulate the hotel concept frame. Then through investigating the various knowledge elements within the hotel concept frame, we find out that hotels are named according to the knowledge elements within the hotel concept frame. These prominent elements become the standard of classification for hotel names, which can be divided into three types:hotel names with single element, hotel names with compound elements and hotel names with complex elements. Finally, the knowledge elements within hotel concept frame have their own meaning. So if they are profiled, they will become the generation motivation of hotel names. However, in the process of hotel naming, the cultural connotation is an indispensable factor affecting people’s thinking, which becomes the generation basis of hotel names.This paper that we study the naming of hotels from perspective of knowledge and cognitive operation is more comprehensive than previous researches on hotel naming; for it pays more attention to human’s internal cognitive mechanisms. The research results are of enormous significance for us to more profoundly understand the connotation and pragmatic function of Chinese hotel names.