A Comparative Study Of The Meanings Of Chinese And Japanese Spatial Adjectives From The Perspective Of Lexical Typology

The concept of space is one of the most basic concepts of human society.Spatial adjective is one of the expressions of space in human languages.This thesis aims to systematically investigate the similarities and differences between the lexicalization patterns and colexification of spatial adjectives in Chinese and Japanese through a comparative analysis of the semantic elements and meanings of spatial adjectives.Lexicalization patterns and colexification are two important concepts of lexical typology.The lexicalization patterns studies the combination of different semantic elements which conflating into one word.Colexification studies different senses contained in one lexeme.There are two parts of the thesis,the first part starts with six semantic elements of "dimension,direction,distance,container,shape,unit",and then summarizes the lexicalization patterns.The second part starts with senses from dictionary,sorts out and integrates the meanings of the 35 members of the Chinese and Japanese spatial adjectives,and conducts a comparative analysis of colexification.The thesis is composed of four chapters.Chapter 1: Introduction;Chapter 2: Theoretical basis,introducing lexicalization patterns and colexification.Besides,introducing the definition and members of spatial adjectives,determining the criteria of definition,unified naming,members introduction and basic meanings;Chapter 3: Lexical comparison of spatial adjectives,through the conceptual categorization to clarify the correspondence between Chinese and Japanese spatial adjectives,and then analyze the semantic elements;Chapter 4:Comparison of colexification,combing and integrating the meaning of spatial adjectives.Based on the comparative study,it was found that the lexicalization patterns of spatial adjectives in Chinese and Japanese are roughly the same,following five lexicalization patterns: [dimension + unit],[dimension + distance + shape + unit],[dimension + distance +direction + shape + unit],[ dimension + distance + unit],[dimension + distance + direction +containerity + unit].The colexification’s features of Chinese and Japanese spatial adjectives are highly similar,except that some Chinese spatial adjectives can be used as nouns,adverbs,verbs,or affixes;Some Chinese concepts are not expressed in Japanese society,and vice versa;Chinese spatial adjectives can be used to express respect or self-esteem,while Japanese rarely uses spatial adjectives to express the same meanings;Some Chinese spatial adjectives only have positive expressions,and there is no relative reverse expression,but Japanese has.