The Cognitive Analysis Of Spatiality And Temporality In Chinese Classifier Structures

As one kind of Chinese content words,the classifier is an important feature that distinguishes Sino-Tibetan languages from Indo-European ones and plays an important role in counting people,objects and actions.And its plenty offers huge room for Chinese expressions,contributing to making abstract and complex meanings specific and vivid.Chinese classifiers are generally divided into noun classifiers and verb classifiers,respectively collocating with nouns and verbs to form classifier-noun structures and verb-classifier structures.The former usually expresses as the structure“numeral+classifier+noun” to convey the quantity of counting people or things,while the latter like “verb+numeral+classifier” to count how frequent or how long an action would last.Regarding the previous researches on this two classifier structures,its amount is very large.And the rising of Cognitive Linguistics pushes the researches into a new stage,namely from description stage to interpretation one,and then to reveal the cognitive mechanisms behind classifier structures.Since the past studies lay focus on a single kind of classifier structures,separating the relationship between the two sorts of classifier structures,this thesis,based on their common parts and differences,attempts to explore the interaction between space and time on classifier structures from the cognitive perspective.Space and time as two fundamental elements in the world are also the two basic concepts in human mind.And it is impossible that the language is used to describe the world without involving space and time.Exactly,the classifier-noun structures correspond to space concept and verb-classifier structures to time concept.On the one hand,matters in space and actions in time can internally relate each other;on the other hand,the interaction between space and time makes them interrelated externally.In order to seek out the cognitive mechanisms hidden in the internal and external relationship between space and time,we will employ metonymy and metaphor theories to analyze the space and time attributes covered in classifier-noun structures and verb-classifier structures from the cognitive perspective.As a result,metonymy works as the fundamental relationship in classifier structures.Apart from that,the metaphor not only enriches the unconventional collocation of classifiers and nouns inclassifier-noun structures,but highlights their proximity in space.When it comes to verb-classifier structures,double metonymic processes facilitate them into varieties and make time feature of verbs prominent.Finally,the classifier structure varieties are caused by the interaction between space and time with the help of metonymy.However,all the varieties must be coerced by construction meaning.