A Comparative Study On Emanation Fictive Motion Between English And Chinese

Emanation,as a type of fictive motion,exists commonly in all languages.Throughout the literature,most of the studies on fictive motion expressions have focused on their generation mechanisms and cognitive motivations.In recent years,with the in-depth study of emanation fictive motion expressions,scholars at home and abroad have also carried out researches from a cross-linguistic perspective,but few papers have conducted systematic comparative studies between English-Chinese.Therefore,based on the motion event frame theory,this paper is devoted to analyses the conceptual element in the expressions of emanation fictive motion between the two languages from the perspective of lexicalization patterns,with a view to discover specific similarities and differences and under this linguistic phenomenon at a more hierarchical level.The research questions in this paper are as follows:(1)What are the lexicalization patterns of conceptual elements in the English-Chinese emanation fictive motion expressions?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the lexicalization patterns between English and Chinese emanation fictive motion expressions?The findings of this study are as follows:(1)Sub-types of emanation fictive motion exist in both English and Chinese expressions,but there are similarities and differences in the construction of English-Chinese emanation fictive motion expressions.Similarities: there is a high degree of overlap in the selection of the source object,the figure and the ground are represented by noun and follow the rule of “figure takes precedence over ground”.Motion element are represented by verbs,and paths tend to emphasize directional information,represented by path verbs,prepositions or satellite elements.Difference: figure is more detailed in the depiction in Chinese,and ground is more flexible in its placement in the sentence.There are more manner verbs to indicate motion in English than in Chinese.Path verbs and manner verbs can be combined to indicate the motion in Chinese,while in English,path verbs have to be followed by satellite components.In path information,English uses a verb-prediction structure,while Chinese uses a verb-direction structure.(2)The English-Chinese emanation fictive motion share the same semantic features,and both reflect the characteristics of satellite-framed languages,but the syntactic structure is distinctly different,with four different structures each other.(3)The similarities between English and Chinese emanation fictive motions reflect the cognitive commonality of human beings,both having the ability to integrate concepts.And the differences are due to different language systems and cultural background.The contributions of this paper are of follows:(1)The study of the similarities and differences between English and Chinese emanation fictive motion based the theory of lexicalization patterns provides a new perspective for language comparison and an example for the clarify the language type of Chinese.(2)This paper summarizes the syntactic structure of English-Chinese emanation fictive motion expressions in terms of the lexicalization patterns analyzed above,which not only deepens our understanding of this linguistic phenomenon,but also provides an opportunity for research related to language teaching and English-Chinese translation.