A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Space Constructions

There has been a set of Chinese characters which express space relations in Chinese, for instance,"shang, xia, qian, hou, zuo, you, wai, li, nei, zhong" etc. In modern Chinese, these characters are often put together with other characters to form some definite character groups to indicate certain space relations. In traditional Chinese grammar, these character groups are regarded as "words" or "word groups", which are compiled into Chinese dictionary. Since Ma Shi Wen Tong, many Chinese grammarians focused on these space words and produced a lot of research works.Since the May4th Movement, Chinese language has experienced a dramatic change. The classical Chinese tends to be replaced by the colloquial style Chinese. Correspondingly, the studies on Chinese space words fall into two main fields; they are the study on ancient Chinese space words and the study on modern Chinese space words separately. The studies on ancient Chinese space words are carried out mainly from the aspect of grammar, semantics, etymology and culture while the studies on modern Chinese space words are mainly carried out from the aspect of grammar, morphology, formal semantics, grammaticalization, TCFL (Teaching Chinese as Foreign Language), language acquisition, comparative linguistics and cognitive linguistics.The present study follows a cognitive linguistic route which is based on the experiential realism. The study takes the construction grammar, the cognitive semantics and the Chinese sinogram-based theory as its theoretical foundations and adopts a quantified and contrastive research method with the space constructions in modern Chinese and contemporary English as its research target. The study tries to give a unified interpretation to the causes and the evolution path of some basic constructions in both Chinese and English.Most of the foreign linguistic theories, including the theory of construction grammar, are based on English and many other languages. When many foreign linguists build up their theories, they seldom take Chinese language into their consideration. Langacker, Lakoff, Croft and Chinese linguists Xu Tongqiang and Wang Yin proposed that linguistic research should follow the route that is from the specific to the general. Famous British linguist William Croft especially emphasizes the specificity of language. He holds the view that there don’t exist such things as cross-language syntactic categories and what exist are constructions which are the primitive units of grammatical analysis. Xu Tongqiang, the initiator of the Chinese sinogram-based theory also proposed that the research of Chinese grammar should return to Chinese tradition. He thinks that based on induction method, people can also get to know the general rules of languages. The present study is a contrastive study between Chinese and English space constructions which is just based on the specificity of Chinese language and under the guidance of Chinese and Western new theories and methods of linguistic studies. By the contrast, the individuality and generality of Chinese and English language are disclosed which might do some contributions to the general linguistics and language typology.Chinese is a kind of ancient language which is the main carrier and important component of Chinese civilization and Chinese culture. It is very unique and with great specialty. Chinese language is full of fixed two-character groups which embodies two-character constructions. The formation of two-character construction has its profound cognitive foundation which can be proved and interpreted from the perspective of experiential view and conceptual structure. The construction grammar and the Sinogram-based theory provide us a powerful tool to explore Chinese and English space constructions. Cognitive semanticists all agree that space concept is one of the basic cognitions that human experienced toward the outside world. From meaning to form, human languages are characterized by space and time marks which represent human being’s understanding and cognitive way toward space and time. The basic theoretical hypothesis of the present research is that we might disclose the mystery of the language structure by means of the space constructions in languages. Many construction grammarians have already made great progress in this field. Many cognitive grammarians, such as Lakoff, Langacker and Talmy, all put forward their theoretical models to explain the forming mechanism of English syntactic structures and the extension processes of word meanings. The present research combines the research of Chinese and English space constructions within one theoretical framework and explains their forming mechanisms from the perspective of space concepts and metaphorical mapping. The research has drawn the following conclusions:(1) The relation between the reality, the cognition and the language has been reviewed. Traditionally, many cognitive linguists agree on such an evolutionary path as from the reality to the cognition and then to human language. In the study, a revision has been made toward such an evolutionary path.(2) From the perspective of cross-linguistic study, the research argues that human being’s space concepts are the important prerequisite and foundation of their language structure. The basic syntactic constructions in both Chinese and English are prototype categories and the prototype numbers of the categories are the space constructions which are based on space concepts. Based on the prototype constructions, the marginal constructions are formed by means of metaphorical mapping. The status of the prototype members and the marginal members will change with time passing and the development of society. The constructions in the language are networks which are organized around conceptual structures and the linguistic knowledge is stored in the mind in the form of network. In the networks, the lower level constructions embody and entail the upper level constructions which are formed on the basis of the inductive reasoning and integrating to the lower level constructions.(3) Through the cross-linguistic empirical analysis, the research cast a doubt on the hypothesis proposed by William Croft and Xie Xinyi that languages can be basically divided into the types of iconic language and abstract language. This study put forward the concept of "symbolicity" to replace Croft’s "iconicity" and draw up a coordinate chart concerning language symbolicity and conventionality. The study also points out that language can either develop along the symbolic route or along the conventional route, but it is not possible for languages to get fully developed along both the two routes. Chinese tends to be a more symbolic language while English get fully developed in the conventional dimension. The dimension of symbolicity and conventionality might become a new standard in language typology.(4) From the perspective of cross-linguistic study, this research gives a further support to Lakoff’s SFH (Spatialization of Form Hypotheses). It has been one of the linguists’most important theoretical pursuits to disclose the mystery of syntactic structure from the perspective of conceptual structure. Construction grammarians have put forward various kinds of cognitive models to try to make an inductive interpretation to syntactic structures. Based on the cognitive linguistics’basic principle, this research tries to simplify and unify the various kinds of theories and models and tries to interpret and generalize some basic syntactic constructions in both Chinese and English with several conceptual parameters concerning space concepts.(5) The universality and particularity of human languages have always been one of the important topics in general linguistics and language typology. Following the route from particularity to universality, the research points out where the particularity and universality actually lie in Chinese and English basic constructions. The research shows that for Chinese and English, the construe of space concepts is universal and each of them has their unique ways to encode these space concepts.