A corpus-based cognitive linguistic analysis of taste terms

Abstract

From a cognitive linguistic perspective, this article delves into the polysemy between the English term sour and its Chinese counterpart suan. The research aims to achieve two key objectives: (1) To explore the similarities and differences in the polysemy of sour in English and suan in Chinese. (2) To identify the cognitive mechanisms that motivate the semantic expansion of sour in English and suan in Chinese. To this end, 《汉语大词典》 (the Great Chinese Dictionary), The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the British National Corpus (BNC), and the Centre for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) Chinese-English Parallel Corpus were used. The dictionaries are utilized to explore the polysemy of sour and suan, while the BNC and CCL Chinese-English Parallel Corpus are employed to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying the semantic extensions of the selected terms. Theoretically, this article draws upon the conceptual metaphor and metonymy theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson. The findings reveal significant semantic overlap between sour in English and suan in Chinese, yet notable distinctions remain. This study has implications for vocabulary teaching as well as cross-linguistic and cross-cultural communication.