A Study of Transferred Epithet in Chinese from the Perspective of Prototype Theory

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201215.325How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Transferred Epithet (TE), prototype theory, transferred word

Abstract

The definition of Transferred Epithet (TE) given by Chen in 1930s is based on the traditional categorization theory, which is too absolute and excludes some linguistic expressions from it. Therefore this paper redefines it with the reference to prototype theory. By adopting a corpus-based approach, the research finds that TE, as a linguistic category, includes both prototype members and non-prototype members. Besides, there are mainly two types of non-prototype ones, the first is structured as “adverb + verb” in which the adverb is transferred word which originally functions as the epithet of objects or things before the transference; the second is realized by the structure of “adjective + noun” where the adjective is transferred from adverb with the latter serving as the environmental elements of verb event before the transference. This study proves the applicability of prototype theory on one hand, more importantly it deepens people’s understanding of the nature of TE on the other hand.

Copyright

© 2020, 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  - Gangni Chen
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/18
TI  - A Study of Transferred Epithet in Chinese from the Perspective of Prototype Theory
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 175
EP  - 180
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201215.325
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201215.325
ID  - Chen2020
ER  -