A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese N+N Exocentric Compounds From The Perspective Of Cognitive Construction

The compound is one of the most significant parts in language acquisition.N+N compounds are quite productive,simple in form and semantically complicated,which becomes very hot in the study of compounds.Scholars study N+N compounds from various perspectives.Whereas most of them take N+N endocentric compounds as the research subject,ignoring the study of N+N exocentric compounds.In daily communication,N+N exocentric compounds are quite frequently used,but few people seem to know how to form and how to comprehend the meaning correctly.N+N exocentric compounds are usually used to express abstract objects and concepts,which are obviously indispensable and significant in verbal communication.Thus,it is quite necessary to study the compounds.At present,the study of N+N exocentric compounds is few both in English and Chinese,and the research of N+N exocentric compounds on the basis of construction grammar theory is even less.According to Goldberg’s Cognitive Construction Grammar Theory,a construction is just a form-meaning pair,which means that a construction is a meaningful form.In N+N exocentric construction,the compound meaning cannot be directly got from the lexical meaning of the nominal constituents.Based on the Construction Coercion Theory,when the construction meaning conflicts with the lexical meaning,construction meaning will coerce the lexical meaning to make them matched and compatible.N+N exocentric compounds inherit some specific features of the two components on the semantic level,hence,the compounds are rich in meaning.The meaning of a N+N exocentric compound is constructed when the features,functions etc.are successfully inherited or changed.This thesis attempts to analyze English and Chinese N+N exocentric compounds within cognitive linguistics.Based on the construction grammar theory,mainly including construction coercion and construction integretion theories,cognitive thinking modes of conceptual metaphor and metonymy will be combined to apply to analyze their meaning construction.At the same time,the factors that cause similarities and differences between them also will be found out.This thesis collects 201 English N+N exocentric compounds and 432 Chinese N+N exocentric compounds,and then analyzes these compounds from the perspectives of metaphor-based coercion,metonymy-based coercion and metaphonymy-based coercion.Due to the common cognitive competence and body experience,there exist similarities among the constructive analysis between English and Chinese N+N exocentric compounds.For instance,the cognitive mechanisms of English and Chinese N+N exocentric compound construction are the same;there exist many N+N compounds referring to people in both languages;no matter in English or in Chinese,metaphor-based exocentric N+N compounds are more than metonymy-based ones.On the other hand,because of the different cultures,environment and social backgrounds,they also have some differences.Knowing the cognitive mechanism of N+N exocentric compounds and the similarities and differences are of great help to language teaching and the translation between English and Chinese.