An Analysis Of Semantic Constraints In The English Translations Of San Zi Jing From The Perspective Of Cognitive Reference Point

The concept of Cognitive Reference Point was firstly proposed by Rosch(1975:532-547),who proved that prototype can be considered as cognitive reference point to judge other members in the category by a series experiment of prototype.Langacker(1993:5-6)firstly applied cognitive reference point to linguistic studies as a kind of basic cognitive ability of human,based on this,he put forward cognitive reference point model and used it to elaborate possessive construction,metonymy,pronoun antecedent relationship,definite article,topic construction and other language phenomenon.Domestic professor Wang Yin(2005)applied mental path feature of cognitive reference point to interpret discourse coherence and discourse cognitive mechanism.Moreover,he proposed seven cognitive reference point models to clarify discourse construction.Cognitive reference point has the feature of saliency,which can be used to guide translators to comprehend and interpret source text.To analyze translation activity from the perspective of cognitive reference point,the source text is the target(T)for translators to cognize.Translators as cognitive conceptualizer(C)will try to find corresponding translation with the source text in the whole language and cultural environment.That translation is cognitive reference point(R).In other words,in the process of translation,translators should choose cognitive reference point which is the most salient for target text readers to interpret and translate the source text.In the process of translation,the choice of cognitive reference point is not free,but is constraint by semantics,such as translators' life experience,cognitive capacities,conventional constraints and contextual constraints.Based on Langacker's and Wang Yin's studies on cognitive reference point,this thesis integrates four cognitive reference point models,taking San Zi Jing and three English versions as the corpus.Through the typical case analysis,this paper explores the influence of semantic constraints' on the choice of reference point and proposes principles in order to provide some inspiration for English translation of Chinese classic readers.