A Cognitive Semantic Study Of DESIRE

Cognitive linguistics proposes that Language study can pry into how human beings understand the world events and their ways. Therefore, we may say that language is a cognitive processing outcome on the base of the way which human beings recognize and savor the outside world.Emotion, on the one hand, is a kind of subjective experience with various influences of the outer-world and physiological inner influences. On the other hand, emotion could be expressed by the medium of language. In this sense, we think language is a very important way to express human beings’emotions. If we take the cognitive linguistic thinking of " Reality--Cognition-Language " as our way, then we can surely better our understanding and expression of emotions. Man’s DESIRE is man’s emotions or man’s demands. Many scholars have presented their own viewpoints, research results and structural models of DESIRE from different perspectives, such as, philosophical or sociological or literary perspectives, etc. Among these researches, Abraham H Maslow’s is the most outstanding one. Maslow proposes an exact, complete and reasonable expression of human beings’desire and a very good sphere of definition, as he sets up a powerful structural model for us to study the abstract connotations of DESIRE. As we all know, the emotions of human beings began to be studied from the perspective of cognitive linguistics at the end of 1980s, most prominently by George Lakoff and Zoltan Kovecses. They made detailed researches about the relationship between human beings’emotions and their corresponding linguistic expressions. They pointed out that conceptual metaphors and metonymies play very important roles in the conceptualization of abstract emotions.This essay based on the cognitive thinking of "Reality--Cognitive--Language" is aimed to explore whether the development of human beings’desire expression supports Maslow’s philosophy of desire requirements and the principles of cognitive linguistics, i.e. from simple to complex, from concrete to abstract, and using simple and concrete things to describe the complex ones; to strengthen out the DESIRE study theories by the human beings; to seek the sense of cognitive model and its structure on the human beings DESIRE; to explore the interaction of mutual-influence, linking, restraining and developing between the human beings and their languages; and to highlight how human beings make full use of the language created by themselves to express their own DESIRE and their cognition of the objective world.