The Comparative Study Of Multiple-locations Circumposition And Nested Locative Construction

Spatial class is the foundation of cognitive,and it has an essential function in cognitive process.All the human behavior exists in the space,and it is the same to the languages.Due to this reason,it has always been the focus of academic research.In the aspect of cognitive,the human being all over the world are all has the same cognition of space,but its manifestations are differing in different languages.In this thesis,I will start from the concept of space,to compare the different expressions of same location in two different constructions which are multiple-locations circumposition in Mandarin and nested locative construction in English,then,to analyze the spatial expression habits of Mandarin and English.Multiple-locations circumposition and nested locative construction are both locate the trajector by a group of position information which is location chain.In this chain,each position connects to each other one by one,showing a way from vantage point to trajector.These two constructions are not frequently used in daily life.This paper will use the knowledge of cognitive grammar,combining the Xing Fuyi’s Small triangle theory,to discuss the different of these two constructions,then dig more information from it.At the aspect of syntactic structure,Multiple-locations circumposition and nested locative construction are state the position information in a same order.But in nested locative construction,locations are forced to match its preposition,each match are separated by comma.Relatively,multiple-locations circumposition is much more fluently and flexible,its prepositions and postpositions can be omitted according to the specific sentences.This is much differ from nested locative constructionIn terms of semantics,they both use the same way to express the cognitive space,except implied information may be a little various between specific usages.However,this doesn’t mean that Chinese and English are share the same spatial expression habit.Indeed,they both following the Figure-Ground Theory in cognitive,but they prefer to choose divergent perspective.In Chinese,people used to describe the target in the sight of reference object,on the other hand,in English,people used to state the target in their own sight.The last,talking about pragmatic values,nested locative construction is not favored by mother tongue,because the district and disadvantage of syntactic structure,together with the codes of language that English usually put the main information at the former part of sentence which nested locative construction happens to be the opposite.This makes it has a narrow scope of application in daily usage.Reversely,multiple-locations circumposition is more convenient and flexible,and is conform to the language habits,so,it’s kind of common in everyday life.Yet,limited by the low frequency of location chain,these two structures are not frequently used either.By the contrast of these two constructions,new knowledge of these two languages can be obtained,and this will do some help to the intercultural communication.