英语动物词汇文化与汉语的比较分析 第7页
Another case of “interchanged” associative meanings of animals is that of horse and bull (cow).
The associative meanings of an animal term may have close relationship with the category and aesthetic judgement of a certain culture. That is to say, the animal which is thought to be with good virtues may be taken as bad guy with certain vices.
3.6 Associative Meaning and Semantic Change
Words acquire considerable meanings from the situational, social and cultural contexts in which they are used, so do the animal terms. Just as the prominent Russian formalist critic, semiotician, and culturologist Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman once mentioned, “No language can exist unless it is steeped in the context of culture; and no culture can exist which does not have at its corner the structure of natural language”（Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture）. British linguist Geoffrey Leech identified seven types of meanings. They are: conceptual meaning (logical, cognitive, or denotative content), connotative meaning (what is communicated by virtue of what language refers to), social meaning (what is communicated of the social circumstances of language use), affective meaning (what is communicated of the feeling and attitudes of the speaker/ writer), reflected meaning (what is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression), collocative meaning (what is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word), thematic meaning(what is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis). Types 2-6 are also categorized as associative meaning（胡壮麟, 2006）. Accordingly, the conceptual meaning of “snake” is the animal itself, while its connotative meaning may be “danger” and “evil”, social meaning “a person who pretends to be kind but actually cannot be trusted”, affective meaning “insidious”, reflected meaning “Satan”, collocative meaning “a snake in the grass”.
At the same time, it’s widely acknowledged that language experienced changes through time, so does the vocabulary of a language. We call this change of lexicons semantic change, also known as semantic shift or semantic progression, which points that the modern meaning is different from the original usage. During the process, words have a number of different aspects according to the contexts in which they are used. Some of these meanings are purely ephemeral; others may develop into permanent shades of meaning.
An important process by which words extend their meaning is called radiation. The primary or central meaning appears at the center in the form of a hub and secondary meaning is independent of all the rest, and may be traced back to the central signification. The primary meaning refers to what a word originally meant and the derivative meaning refers to the meaning springing from the original meaning. There are cases where older meanings are often restricted to a narrow range of set phrases and newer meanings can occur more freely. And the newer meaning occurs in a wider variety of contexts than原文请找腾讯752018766优,文'论~文^网
http://www.youerw.com extended meanings transcend much over the animal proper. It is suggested that animal terms may experience a certain type of semantic changes. (陆国强,1999)
It’ s through these semantic change and man’ s evolution that we have attached various associative meanings and cultural elements to animals around us, and the more intimate the relationship between animals and us, the more cultural meanings they are given.
4 The Significance of Comparative Study on Animal Terms between English and Chinese from the Perspective of Culture
As we stepped into the third millennium, the world has been changed into a global village where people can’t live without being influenced by others, therefore, it’ s irrevocable that we communicate and exchange information with people of other cultures.
In that case, the importance and necessity of acquiring and improving intercultural communication competence (ICC competence) becomes all the more obvious. About 10,000 years ago, human groups have started to try domestication and livestock husbandry. Animals and humans are in symbiosis. It is this close relationship between the two that provides abundant resources for the study of cross-cultural communication among different regions with diverse flora and fauna. To know the cultural differences between animal terms in both Chinese and English can elevate people’ s language competence and communicative skills inasmuch as animals are the most common and intimate things around us that load extended meanings. In order to command a relatively skillful communicative competence rather than the competence of the abstract language system, i.e., the knowledge about the grammar of certain language, a joint study of language and its cultural background such as that of animal terms, becomes the focus of language teaching and learning tasks. ( 陈治安 李力 刘承宇, 2005)上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
英语动物词汇文化与汉语的比较分析 第7页下载如图片无法显示或论文不完整，请联系qq752018766
