A Cognitive Study Of English Spatial Preposition In And Chinese Circumposition Zai...Li

The perception and experience of space is the integral part of human life,as a result,the notion of space is one of the most essential concepts of the humanity.Scholars of all time basically believe that our initial cognition about the physical world has started with the spatial orientation of the human living environment.To put it another way,people began to perceive the external world from the space position relationship.The fact that English and Chinese belong to different language families determines that they utilize different ways to express the spatial position relationship.In terms of space concept,English mainly relies on spatial prepositions,while Chinese tends to use preposition plus locative to represent the spatial relations,known as circumposition.This paper targets the common English spatial preposition IN and the Chinese circumposition ZAI...LI as the research objects,because in the field of the study of spatial concepts,cognitive linguistics abroad has made great achievements,especially in light of the thorough research on prepositions OVER,ABOVE and ON.Comparatively,domestic research has made the analysis of comparing spatial sense instead of semantic distinguishing.Either prepositions or locative postpositions have been investigated separately,and circumpositions received less attention.In view of this,this paper analyzes the spatial preposition IN and the circumposition ZAI...LI from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Specifically,the prototype theory and image schema are used to determine the prototypical sense and prototypical schema,and based on these,IN and ZAI...LI are analyzed from different dimensions and trajectory landmark relation.Through the extension of metaphor,the paper further discusses what non-spatial target domains are built by their spatial senses and makes a brief comparison of the whole distribution.The research findings indicate that the prototypical image of the two is the CONTAINER schema,which is capable of constructing one-dimensional,two-dimensional,as well as three-dimensional spatial senses,with both dynamic and static spatial senses.In the distribution of semantic extensions,the word IN can be extended to at least nine abstract domains such as time,state,number,scope,media,motion and so forth.Meanwhile,Chinese circumpostition ZAI...LI can be extended to five abstract domains involving time,state,scope,media and motion.This shows that,on the one hand,although the two words in English and Chinese is generated in two relatively independent environments,there does exist similar prototypical sense and metaphorical extensions.On the other hand,people have formed different cognitive modes about the similar concepts largely due to distinct ethnic thinking patterns and living habits.The contribution of this study lies in the following two aspects.Firstly,our research,theoretically,proved the feasibility of using cognitive approach to study the similar concepts of two distinctive languages,especially the application of the prototype theory and image schema theory to explain the Chinese language phenomenon ZAI...LI.Secondly,from the practice perspective,our study provides reference and guidance for the preposition teaching,and advocates that students can better understand and use prepositions if cognitive approach is effectively merged into teaching process,which shed some light on preposition teaching to some extent.