Comparative Analysis Of Chinese And English Spatial Words Based On The Image Schema

Metaphor has been commonly noted in our daily life. Many experts in different fields have carried out systematic researches from different perspectives and formed some systematic and influential metaphor theories. Metaphor is not only a kind of language phenomenon, but also closeness related to human’s cognition.Taking spatial metaphor and image schema as the theoretical framework, based on the corpus and taking IN/OUT and NEI/WAI as examples, this thesis demonstrates the similarities and differences of the metaphorical usages of IN/OUT and NEI/WAI. The data in this thesis all come from dictionaries. By analyzing the Chinese and English data, the author found that in spite of a small amount of data with the original spatial meaning, a large number of data are of the metaphorical meaning. Furthermore, this thesis categorizes the metaphorical usages in detail. In the meantime, the metaphorical usages are explored based on the TRAJECOTR-PATH-LANDMARK concept of image schema. Finally, the author summarizes the similarities and differences of the spatial words IN/OUT and NEI/WAI. In this thesis, the author found that the four concepts of the research are rooted in the bodily experience. The spatial metaphors which are mainly used to understand and build the basic concepts of scope, time, activity and state exist in both Chinese and English. Meanwhile, English and Chinese metaphors of IN/OUT and NEI/WAI are similar in most aspects, and the differences exist in social relations and state.The results further confirm the fact that metaphor is a prevalent phenomenon in ordinary language. The spatial words’metaphorical extensions are always transformed to the abstract non-spatial domain based on image schema, which are also rooted in our daily experiences.