| "Water" is one of the most basic material for human survival, and it plays an important role in people’s cognition. In the long-term production and daily life, people produce plenty of expressions about metaphor and metonymy which related to "water", meanwhile, the original meaning of "water" cognition is changing imperceptibly. Under the theoretical framework of cultural linguistics and cognitive linguistics, this paper makes a comparitive study of "water" cognition in Chinese and English, aims to solve the following three problems: Whether the cognitive characteristics are exist in the original meaning, metaphor and metonymy of "water" between Chinese and English, and how does the cognitive approach formed? Whether the cognitive commonness are exist in the original meaning, metaphor and metonymy of "water" between Chinese and English, and how does the cognitive approach formed? What influence did the "water" cognition get from the different cultural environment between the two nations? By taking the Chinese and English dictionaries and COCA, CCL, METALUDE corpora as the data sources, this paper concludes the related expressions of "water" between Chinese and English. After the analysis of the data collection and comparison, the following findings are yielded: firstly, several new modern usage of "water" appears in Chinese, and it shows that nouns have a trend of being verbalized and adjectivalized. Secondly, there are twentiy-six kinds of metaphor and four kinds of metonymy of "water".There’re five unique meataphors in Chinese and one unique metaphor in English; there are also three kinds of metonymy both in Chinese English and one unique metonymy in Chinese. the "water" cognitions overall reflect cultural similarities between two nations, and the differences in "water" cognitions attribute to the two languages’ cultural differences in the unique geographical environment, philosophy, religious view and national personality. |
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