A Comparative Study Of Body Classifying Constructions In Chinese And English

This study aims to compare the use of body nouns as classifiers in Chinese and English, discovering distributional features of each component in body classifying constructions and characteristics of collocations between different components, and what’s more, offering a reasonable explanation for collocations between body classifiers and central nouns from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. After a careful consideration of factors like habitual use, semantic features, number of characters and so on of Chinese body nouns, fifty frequently used Chinese body nouns and their English counterparts are chosen in the study to be searched in respective forms of classifying constructions in Chinese and English in two corpuses,namely Center for Chinese Linguistics(CCL) by Peking University and Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA). After deleting the instances of non-classifying constructions and verbal classifying constructions from the material collected, the remaining part constitutes the corpus of this study. A detailed comparative analysis reveals:1) Similarities and differences coexist in the distribution of body classifiers,central nouns, numeral words and their counterparts of body classifying constructions in Chinese and English. There are more body classifiers and less central nouns in English than in Chinese. In Chinese, “ 一(a/an)” and “ 满(fullness)” collocate with different body classifiers and central nouns. Body classifiers that can be attached with suffix-ful are not the same as body classifiers that collocate with “满(fullness)”.2) There are rules governing collocations between components of body classifying constructions in Chinese and English. Spatial meanings and semantics of nouns play a crucial role in collocations between nouns and other elements. In both Chinese and English, central nouns comprise not only concrete nouns that have strong spatial meanings but also abstract nouns that have weak spatial meanings, but the proportion that each noun category accounts for in the two languages is different. The semantics of central nouns in both languages are relatively concentrated and references of some central nouns can be attached to or contained by a body part.Spatial meanings of body classifiers in the two languages can explain two kinds of body classifying constructions: one kind in which body parts are considered as containers and the other kind in which body parts and references of central nouns are similar in shapes. In both Chinese and English, semantics of body classifiers display features of “one body classifier collocating with plenty of central nouns” and “plenty of body classifiers collocating with one central noun”. In terms of collocations between body classifiers and numeral words, a/an and “一(a/an)” can collocate with nearly every body classifier while “满(fullness)” and-ful are used in body classifying constructions where body parts are regarded as containers. For collocations between central nouns and numeral words, “一(a/an)” and a/an collocate with nouns of various kinds while the presence of “满(fullness)” and-ful has something to do with attaching or containing relation.3) Cognitive principles govern collocations between body classifiers and central nouns of body classifying constructions in Chinese and English. Metaphor and metonymy theories in cognitive linguistics can be applied to explain connections that body classifiers and central nouns establish on the basis of similarity in shape or size,part-whole relation and attachability or containability of body parts.