A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of Basic Temperature Adjectives In English And Chinese

Temperature is an ordinary natural phenomenon,which is also one of the basic sensations human beings can feel.In linguistics,studies of temperature-sensation adjectives keep coming out.However,previous studies focused more on a single language than on cross-languages.Furthermore,the studies are mainly on semantics but not on grammatical studies.In this thesis,four pairs of basic temperature adjectives in English and Chinese are taken as our research objects and we manage to answer two questions.(1)What are the similarities and differences of grammatical features in basic temperature adjectives in English and Chinese and what are the motivations for them?(2)What are the semantic similarities and differences between basic temperature adjectives in English and Chinese and what are the motivations for them?On contrastive grammatical study,the thesis firstly analyzes the morphological features of basic temperature adjectives in English and Chinese;then discusses the related constructions according to the various syntactic functions they have.The research shows that(1)the morphological features of each party are different:basic English temperature adjective are monosyllabic,while their Chinese counterparts have the tendency of being combined with other words to form new temperature adjectives;(2)though the syntactic functions of basic temperature adjectives in English and Chinese are similar,there are similarities as well as differences in terms of the constructions involved in the study;(3)the economic principle and language systemic differences can be used to explain the similarities and differences.On contrastive semantic study,the thesis firstly analyzes the basic meanings of basic temperature adjectives in English and Chinese,and then makes a contrastive study of each pair of temperature concepts:it firstly discusses the basic meanings and then the extended meanings based on conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual metonymy theory.The latter analyses consist of two parts:a contrastive study of similarities and differences of basic temperature adjectives in English and Chinese and a study of the motivations for them.The research shows that:(1)the original meanings of English and Chinese basic temperature adjectives are generally similar,while their extended ones are similar as well as different;(2)though some of the meanings of a pair of words are in the same domain,they don't necessarily have an identical meaning;(3)there are three reasons for the similarities and differences:language,the physical world and culture.