Contrastive Study On English And Chinese Nominal Classifier Structures:A Cognitive Typological Perspective

In grammatical system of Chinese,classifier is regarded as an independent word class when compared with other languages.Generally,Chinese classifier owns the following features,they include large in number,flexible in usage,diverse in rhetoric and rich in emotion.Conversely,English has no such specific word class that is exclusively used for classification,but it does have classifier structures,especially nominal classifier structures,which have the identical functions to their Chinese counterparts.Naturally,there have been an enormous amount of comparative studies on English and Chinese nominal classifier structures.Along with the development of the cognitive linguistics,the researches on the classifier structures range(or diversify)from descriptive to interpretative,which provide a brand-new perspective for the contrastive study.Noticeably,cognitive typology,a new branch of cognitive linguistics,is increasingly applied to the study of classifier structures nowadays.The cognitive typology refers to classification or generalization that represents a well-established method of analysis.It deals with the methodological and empirical issues by cross-linguistic comparison and generalizes language universals.In view of this,the present thesis places the contrastive study in a new and different perspective(cognitive typological perspective),so as to explore the similarities and differences of English and Chinese nominal classifier structures from synchronic and diachronic aspects respectively.This thesis shows that most of English and Chinese nominal classifier structures derive from content words especially nouns and verbs,these content words were grammaticalized and take the function of classification gradually.The evolving process of the nominal classifier structures corresponds to the process of categorization,which extend from the prototypical member to peripheral members.The classified subjects developed from the concrete entities that own some similar features to material and abstract objects.By analyzing,we find that there are several differences of nominal classifier structures in two languages,chiefly in three aspects: the form,the distribution and the syntactic features.According to the tenet of cognitive linguistics,the cognition of nominal classifierstructures is not passively received but actively constructed by the cognitive subjects.Although English and Chinese nominal classifier structures are different in some aspects,the ways people in two different languages perceive and construct the concept of classification are quite the same.They are inclined to form the structures of classification on the basis of embodied philosophy and metaphorical thinking patterns.In this thesis,plenty of examples are given to verify two kinds of construction mechanisms of the nominal classifier structures: metaphor-metonymy continuum mechanism and embodied cognition mechanism,aiming to provide a new perspective to the cognition and construction of English and Chinese classifier structures and further tapping into the vivid graceful charm of classifier structures.