A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Insect Words

If the history book of mankind was opened, a living-being named“insects” could be found as early as340million years ago even moreancient than human being. As the elves of the nature, insects can be seenhere and there, from the top of the mountain to the bottom of the ocean.Pollinating the plants and being eaten by the animals, insects are not onlyindispensable in the natural ecosystems, but also keeping a closerelationship in the production and living of human life with its uniquecharacter. The vocabularies concerning the insects are the concentrationrefined from people’s lives, with a reflection of the geological and folkfeatures of the living area as well as the way of thinking and literarytradition of the people.Taking Cognitive linguistics and comparative linguistics as theTheoretical basis, this research analyzes the semantic meaning of thenational customs in English and Chinese, moreover explores themetaphors related to the insects, to make a profound comparison betweenEnglish and Chinese of the vocabularies concerning the insects, andsearch for the reasons for this distinctions. The whole thesis could bedivided into six chapters:Chapter one is introduction, the origin and significance of this researchand the scope of the study, ideas, objectives and methods, as well as thesource corpus would be represented in this chapter. The second chapter isliterature review, through the English-Chinese comparison and researchon the insects’ vocabulary in China, chiefly declare the insufficiency ofthe existing achievements.Chapter three is the theoretical basis of the research including thesemantic meaning of the national customs and metaphor. Thecomparative analyses of “insects’ vocabulary” such as “butterfly”,“honeybee”,“fly” etc, would be made in the fourth chapter.Chapter five expounds the causation of the results of the comparison inthe last chapter from the aspect of natural geographical environment, folkculture, and way of thinking and literary tradition. Chapter six is theconclusion, summarization and prospect of the research would be statedin this chapter.