The assortedness of Chinese food,together with the complexity of their naming elements,has ignited numerous scholars' interests in this field and prompted them to make abundant analyses of Chinese dish names.Most of them,however,were done in studies of traditional linguistics,rhetoric,translatology and cross-cultural communication.And studies,based on corpus,on the naming elements of Chinese dishes under cognitive linguistic theories almost remain a blank.This paper aims to conduct a quantitative analysis of 4,000 Chinese dish names(500 ones selected freely from each of the eight cuisines),based on the Prominence Principle,in order to identify the specific naming elements of Chinese dishes and forward related statistics and ratios.
