A Comparison between English and Chinese Commendatory and Derogatory Words?A Study Based on Dictionaries and Thesauri

摘要

Commendatory and derogatory words are two kinds of words which have additional attitudinal inclination based on the conceptual meaning of the words. Utterers convey their positive or negative attitude towards people, objects, and phenomena in discourses with commendatory and derogatory words both intentionally and unconsciously. This study draws multifaceted comparisons between Chinese and English commendatory and derogatory words from the aspects of scale, distribution of POT (parts of speech), morpheme structure, meaning extension, and application in discourses through statistics and analyses of dictionaries and thesauri.