This week’s reading mainly covers the study of meaning: semantics. First, three types of semantics are introduced in the book, and they are: linguistic meaning, social meaning, and affective meaning. Our focus on this chapter is the very first one, which includes sense and referential meaning. Besides, Finegan also deals with a number of concepts of lexical semantics, such as hyponymy, part/whole relationships, synonymy, antonymy, converseness, polysemy, homonymy, and metaphor. I personally think, for me, metaphors are the hardest part of the English learning at the stage where I'm now. Metaphors are the use of a word beyond its primary sense and it is so living and creative that it sometimes doesn’t reach into my understanding. For example, “It is raining cats and dogs.” I would never know why cats and dogs are related to raining if my teacher didn’t explain it to me. But I know this is the interesting, rich, and highlighting part of languages.
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Chia-fang, are there many common metaphors in Chinese?
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