英汉语“水”的认知语义分析

从认知语言学的角度,以隐喻和转喻为手段,运用英汉语料,对英汉语"水"的语义认知进行分析和比较,可将投射的范围大致归纳为3个方面:1)自然/环境域,2)情感/态度域,3)社会/事物关系域。通过隐喻或转喻,"水"的概念向外实现了语义扩展。"水"语词认知语义结构的共性和差异,一方面表明人类最初对客观世界的认知基本相同,另一方面不同民族对同一事物的不同的透视角度使"水"的认知产生不同语义,带有鲜明的民族性,从而揭示其语义投射不仅应从认知角度,还应从社会文化角度着手进行研究。

A Cognitive Semantic Analysis of WATER in English and Chinese

From the cognitive linguistics perspective,the paper takes as example the basic word "water" in both English and Chinese to make a contrastive study on the cognitive features of metaphoric or metonymic expressions.Thus,the concept of WATER is projected to three conceptual domains: 1) the nature/surrounding domain,2) the emotion/attitude domain,and 3) the society/relationship domain.By exploring their similarity and difference in the cognitive semantic structuring and mechanism,it is shown that human being have the same original cognition towards the objective world on the one hand,and different nations perceive the same thing from various outlooks on the other,which generate different concepts,with their own distinctive national character.Therefore,the study should take into account both cognitive and socio-cultural factors as well.