Análisis de las locuciones españolas relacionadas con el sentido auditivo y sus equivalentes en chino

Abstract

This dissertation is organized into two clear parts. The first part, which is of a theoretical nature, consists in a framework built on three components: an introduction to Linguistic Cognitivism, with Cognitive Semantics as the core; a description about the auditory sense, with focus on auditory cognition; and phraseological theory, including that developed by Chinese phraseologists. In the study of phraseological theory and its units, the fundamental aspects related to idiomatic units have been addressed: the relationship with the idioms in English, properties, categories, to conclude in the idiomatic units of greatest concern in this thesis: the locutions. The second part is research about Spanish locutions related to the auditory sense and their Chinese equivalents. The choice of these locutions responds to the suggestion of the current Sensory Linguistics, one of the powerful branches of the current Cognitive Linguistics. The aforementioned research constitutes the core of this dissertation. The first task was to define the methodology we followed: objectives, corpus creation, and using translation and comparison as tools. Next, an extended analysis was carried out, where a double distinction is possible. It begins with the analysis of the conceptual structure of the Spanish locutions related to the auditory sense extracted from the Documented Phraseological Dictionary of Current Spanish by Seco, Andrés and Ramos (2004). The first analysis paved the way for the next step consisting of the comparative analysis of these locutions and their equivalents in Chinese. The comparative analysis carried out allowed a deep insight into the way in which the auditory elements are manifested in the figurative language, as well as to explore conceptual similarities and differences between Spanish language and Chinese language with respect to the auditory sense. To achieve this, we classified Spanish locutions, according to their auditory prototypicity, into metaphorical, metonymic and metaphtonymic ones. The key to the whole analysis has been the distinction between the “literal meaning (corresponding to the original, initial, or compositional meaning)” and “real meaning (corresponding to the meaning of use, final and valid in a given context)”. By way of evaluation and summary, the conclusions of the analysis carried out have shown us: a) the literal meaning of the locutions analyzed is not necessarily compositional, since it can entail some figurative language; b) the degree of auditory prototypicity of a locution is directly related to its semantic motivation; c) the higher is the degree of auditory prototypicity of a Spanish locution, the more likely is it to find equivalents in Chinese with a semantic configuration motivated by the auditory element; d) with respect to the auditory modality, the translational correspondence can only be partial; and e) this translational correspondence depends, mainly, on the degree to which an original Spanish locution and its Chinese equivalent share the auditory modality and on the fact that said auditory element necessarily participates in figurative language.