Abstract: The word Tao-Yao was originated from The Book of Songs. The prototype meaning of the word when created was “beauty of blooming peach blossom”. The meaning evolved however to “marriage of female” in books of Yuan Dynasty. On researching the meaning of the word in books from Tang to Qing Dynasty, the paper analyses the evolution of the word meaning on the base of Cognitive Psychology as well as the schema and metaphor theories.From the view of cognitive schemata, we can see that the reason of this meaning evolution is that schemata of the word Tao-Yao comes from people’s repeated experience , and through metaphor mechanisms, the edge significance “marriage of female”gradually came to the center, and finally replaced the original prototype meaning.

Key words: The Book of Songs, Tao-Yao, cognitive linguistics, prototype meaning, metaphor