A Study Of The Naming Mechanisms Of The Chinese Dishes

During the recent years,more and more studies about Chinese dish names were carried out from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics.However,most of the studies only talked about the rhetoric features or the metaphorical structures of the Chinese dish names,ignoring the function word forms have for the Chinese dish names.The use of word forms reflects the naming system of Chinese dish names,because they are the start points from which word meanings can expand.As a result,this research emphasizes the importance of the word forms in the Chinese dish names.Knowing that there are dish names with aesthetic features which cannot be understood by merely analyzing word forms of the dish names,this research also wants to construct a conceptual structure for the cultural concepts in the Chinese dish names.Plenty of studies had found that Chinese dish names with aesthetic features are the collocation of cultural images.Data in this research mainly came from menus of the local restaurants.The collected data is analyzed separately according to their functions in transmitting information about Chinese dishes.Dish names in this research have been put into two groups: descriptive dish names and the dish names with aesthetic feature,each of the groups has its various subsets,and these subsets are all essential for the composition of dish names.This research uses primitive data hoping to find the most common used words and word forms when naming the Chinese dishes.It is confirmed that dish names have limited number of characters.If limited number of characters is used to name all the Chinese dishes,this amount of characters must show strong patterns and have own engraved routines in the naming system of the dishes.Besides,by the analysis of the cultural images and people' daily experience about the catering culture this research has found that dish names with aesthetic features have their regularities too.These kinds of regularities of the aesthetic dish names have been shown by the connections among the cultural concepts.And these conceptual connections can be explained by theories aboutthe frame semantics.This research studies Chinese dish names from two perspectives.The first studying perspective is about the word forms of the descriptive words in Chinese dish names.The second perspective is about the semantic frames and the conceptual structure of the cultural images in the Chinese dish names.From the first perspective,it has been found that firstly there are limited words for naming the Chinese dishes;Secondly,the majority of the dish names are descriptive but not with aesthetic features,and words in the descriptive dish names have fixed word forms with certain amount of word forms repeatedly appearing in the dish names(it is found that words used in Chinese dish names are always with aesthetic sense despite of the fact that few figure of speeches such as metaphor or personification are applied in naming the dishes);Thirdly,most of the names that are special in forms or with poetic expressions are actually originally from the nature of them,In other words,the reason why they are special is not because people give them good names,they are special only because these dishes are the combinations of good ingredients coming from the nature(most dish names are directly adapted from the names of food materials).From the second perspective,it has been found: firstly,cultural images and meanings to be emphasized determine the names of the dishes with aesthetic features;secondly,cultural images(concepts of Chinese catering culture)of the dish names with aesthetic features show some kinds of regularities,in this research,we use semantic frames and the conceptual structure of semantic frames to explain cultural concepts in the dish names with aesthetic features;thirdly,the naming mechanism of dish names with aesthetic features can be described as choices based on both the cultural concepts and the word forms.