The Cognitive Study on Generic Elements of Plant Names in Chinese

Abstract

Plant taxonomic nomenclature is not only the core research field of taxonomy, but also a cognitive activity of human beings, which reflects the pattern of knowing the world of human beings and influences directly the structure of concept in human mind and the expression, usage and understanding of the language. This paper, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, examines the formation and the semantic motivation of Chinese scientific plant names in different plant taxonomic categories. It reveals that during the process of plant-naming in Chinese, generic element is prevalent, this kind of elements not only presents different levels and types of classification and language features, but also participates in the cognition of plant concept. Generic element embodies the mental processes and features of conceptualization and categorization during the procedure of knowing plant objectives of human beings and is the result of plant classification concept lexicalization. Analyzing the generic elements in Chinese plant taxonomic naming from the perspective of cognitive linguistics can not only enrich the research fields and achievements of scientific and technological vocabularies and categories, but also provide a basis for further standardizing Chinese plant naming.