A Survey of Marked Construction Contrast Between English Transferred Epithet and Chinese Yijiu from the Perspective of Language Prototype-Model

The transferred epithet is the creative application of word collocations violating convention in structure and contrary to logical reasoning with markedness, which, however, is appropriate and effective in a specific context.The transferred epithet is not only a rhetorical means of language, but also a most basic cognitive strategy.The current paper is aimed at exploring inherent consistency and bias between human cognition and language through the marked characteristics of English and Chinese transferred epithets from the perspective of language prototype-model.Findings show that, on the one hand, the prototypical nature of the human cognition of the objective world determines that English and Chinese transferred epithets enjoy the same or similar marked characteristics: (a) English and Chinese transferred epithets promote marked semantic collocations by temporarily changing the word collocations, and then achieve the rhetorical effect of humor, defamiliarization, and economy.(b) The most commonly used transfer modifiers in English and Chinese transferred epithets are adjectives.(c) The transfer directions of English and Chinese modifiers involve transferring people to things, things to people, and substance A to substance B.(d) English and Chinese transferred epithets have a consistent fixed structure: the transferred word plus the head word.On the other hand, due to the model nature of human language that copies the objective world, there are striking differences between English and Chinese transferred epithets: (a) English transferred epithet modifiers include adjectives, participles, nouns, prepositional phrases, and adverbs, while Chinese transferred epithet modifiers are mainly adjectives, with a few nouns and adverbs.(b) English modifiers are transferred from a position close to the front of the head word to the front of a quantifier or category word, while Chinese modifiers can not.Chinese adjective modifiers can move from the front of the modified to the back of the modified, but English adjective modifiers cannot.(c) The use of prepositional phrases as transfer modifiers in English is more common than in Chinese.(d) English transferred epithets may draw on such configurations as “participle + noun” and “noun + of + noun”, but Chinese transferred epithets may not.