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It serves us great purpose to make acquaintance with cultural characteristics of English and Chinese nations by studying the associative meaning of plant words in these two nations; furthermore, it plays an indispensable role in English teaching and intercultural communication. People will make mistakes in communicating on condition that we do not understand the associative meaning of the word. It is easy to cause the semantic transfer and give rise to the failure of communication.
2. Literature Review
Fan Xiurong has written a thesis---A Comparative Study of Associative Meaning of Words in English and Chinese, which introduced the definition of the associative meaning of words (Fan Xiurong, 2005: 53). Leech’s semantics work is the earliest book, from which we are in contact with the associative meaning (Leech, 1997: 296).
Yang Yuangang has analyzed the associative meaning of plant words from three parts: semantic overlap, semantic mismatch and semantic lap. Semantic overlap means the overlap of associative meanings of plant words. One plant word is possessed of the same literal meaning both in English and Chinese, but there’s a great difference between the associative meanings. This is the definition of semantic mismatch. Semantic lap means associative meaning of plant words only in Chinese or in English language. He enumerated a few examples to explain his point of views Such as laurel, peach, willow, and apple (Yang Yuangang, 2002: 74).
Wang Yanru’s article expressed the factors of forming the different associative meanings of plant words in Chinese and English languages. They are mode of thinking, aesthetic, and history (Wang Yanru, 2007: 232). And Pan Le explained the causes from environments and system of phonetics and semantics (Pan Le, 2008: 169).
Fan Jin has explained the influence of associative meaning of plant words on intercultural communication (Fan Jin, 2009: 247).
Foreign countries are comparatively lack of the discussions about this title. What’s more, in domestic, scholars are lack of studying the factors of forming the same associative meaning of plant words. And this thesis supplements this part.
3. Associative Meaning and Plant Words
3.1 Definition of Associative Meaning
According to the semantics work written by Leech, semantics is pided into seven types. They are conceptual meaning, connotative meaning, social meaning, affected meaning, thematic meaning, collocative meaning and reflected meaning, among of which, the five types belong to associative meaning. They are connotative meaning, social meaning, affected meaning, collocative meaning and reflected meaning.
The connotative meaning is an additional meaning of words other than the conceptual meaning of the words. It is kind of perception of person on someone or something. It is the subjective opinion of people and varies with different inpiduals.
The social meaning means the social environment of linguistic performance. It contains time, dialect, mood and characteristics etc.
The affected meaning is the meaning of reflecting speakers’ or writers’ feelings and attitudes. Due to the fame and profit, people may add their own subjective feelings in the course of cognizing the things when they get touch with and are acquainted with the objective things and phenomena. These subjective feelings become the evaluation scale of the feeling and become a component added to semantic. We named the component as affected meaning.
The collocative meaning is suitable for using in the context. It is delivered by the association of the words appear at the same time. Distinctive features are produced by the fixed combination of the word.
The reflected meaning is the meaning which is passed through the association of another meaning of the same word (Leech, 1997: 296).