A Quantitative Study of Metaphor and Metonymy Distributions in the Naming of Global Newly Discovered Species in English and Chinese

DOI

10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.292How to use a DOI?

Keywords

naming; global newly discovered species; metaphor; metonymy; distribution

Abstract

Naming as the link between words and objects has been concerned for centuries. However, little is known about the cognitive mechanism of its metaphoric and metonymic conceptual structure. To answer the question, the study conducted an across-language investigation into distributions of metaphor, metonymy and their cognitive prominent patterns in the English and Chinese naming of global newly discovered species (GNDS) over 2008-2018. This paper poses the following two questions: first, how do metaphor and metonymy distribute in naming GNDS? Second, how do they interrelate to each other in the conceptual integration, and what is actually the mechanism behind is? The statistical results show that: namings in the two languages require more accurate and diversified indications of entities by means of metaphor and metonymy determined by the homogeneity of the conceptual structure evolvement in compliance with the Principle of Least Efforts, and the highlighted categories and prominent patterns in the conceptual integration are more or less the same by demonstrating an intrinsic hierarchy in metaphorization and metonymization; the naming in English is more analytic in the conceptual structure owning to its linear structure, but in Chinese it is more synthetic determined by the default distinctive feature plus entity structure; the prominent patterns in English namings are more diversified in a wide range than that in Chinese, and the categories of Locative & Time, and Event are more easily perspectivized in English, while the categories of Component, Time & Size are more easily perspectivized in Chinese; metaphor, metonymy and their cognitive prominent patterns represent a probability distribution of universality and diversity of namings in the two languages, motivated by the complexity of natural species in the biological world.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xianwu Zhou
AU  - Haitao Liu
AU  - Siming Luo
AU  - Chen Yu
PY  - 2019/07
DA  - 2019/07
TI  - A Quantitative Study of Metaphor and Metonymy Distributions in the Naming of Global Newly Discovered Species in English and Chinese
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Humanities (ICCESSH 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1325
EP  - 1330
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.292
DO  - 10.2991/iccessh-19.2019.292
ID  - Zhou2019/07
ER  -