|
Many place names in Taiwan are named with Taiwanese Southern Min pronunciation, and by analyzing the Taiwanese Southern Min place names in Taiwan, we can understand the naming methods of the Southern Min ethnic group. In this thesis, we discuss Taiwanese Southern Min names in Hsinchu City from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, first obtaining and filtering toponymic data, and then analyzing them with body metaphors to sort out the naming practices of the Southern Min ethnic group. The study found that Taiwanese Southern Min language has a high degree of systematization in place naming, and that body metaphors in place naming are mostly “positional similarity” mapping to objects and space, with “head, tail, and foot” indicating front and back, up and down orientation; “shape similarity” is based on“head”, which is a distinctive shape, and “tail”, which is an elongated pattern; and “functional similarity” is only found in the word “mouth”, which is regarded as a “container” metaphor for concepts such as “exterior, passageway”, etc. The study also found that “mouth”, which is regarded as a “container” metaphor for concepts such as “exterior, passageway”, is the only one that is functionally similar. The only character with similar functions is “mouth”, which is regarded as a container and a metaphor for the concepts of “exterior, passageway”. It is also found that although “尾” and “腳” both denote “end”, their use in place names is quite distinct. “尾” mostly corresponds to the character “頭” to denote “back, front” or “down, up” parallel to the ground, while “腳” corresponds to the character “頂” which is not regarded as a body word by the Taiwanese Southern Min language, but is used a great deal in place names, to denote “down, up” perpendicular to the name of a place. |