A Contrastive Study Of Spatial Orientation Expression In Chinese And English

This article is a comparative study of Chinese and English languages on the synchronic plane. Space concept is the foundation of human cognition towards the outside world. Many non-spatial concepts are based on the concept of space by metaphor both in Chinese and English, which show the fundamentality and significance of the spatial categories. This study takes the spatial orientation concept as a deep semantic and establishes a study framework based on two subcategories—Static Location Category and Dynamic Displacement Category. The main task of the study is to investigate the similarities and characteristics of the cognitive and encoding methods of the same deep meaning between the two languages. Through the analysis of a large number of actual data, this study tries to give a reasonable explanation of the phenomena by using the language inner adjustment system and research results of cognitive linguistics and the linguistic typology.The first three chapters introduce the writing intention; review the related research achievements at home and abroad so far; and then the scope, content and related conceptions of this study are defined; discuss some key theoretical issues and lay a foundation for the subsequent comparison. The following three chapters(the fourth/the fifth and the sixth chapters) are the key chapters of this thesis, which respectively, compare from the perspective of the Chinese and English expressions and the two sub categories. At each point of contrast, this paper first lists the related semantic elements, then in accordance with the classification of semantic refinement to match two languages in the expression elements. At last, compare how language constrains the process of encoding, find the regularity and explain the reasons for differences. Two kinds of language expression are the name with different values and the same value of two kinds of linguisitic forms. Both of them have similarities, but they are not completely correspondent, each having a special means of expression. In this paper, the spatial orientation category is divided into two sub categories, static position category and dynamic displacement, and the comparative study of the two languages is carried out. The comparative study of static position category includes the object, reference and expression of state verbs; dynamic displacement category includes [move], [background], [exercise], [path] four basic semantic elements. In this paper, we further reveal the similarities and differences between the two languages through the methods of Chinese-English translation and English-Chinese translation. The seventh chapter is the summary of the full text: the contribution and deficiencies of the study are separately illustrated; give suggestions to future research.This study results confirm that the similarities between Chinese and English on expressing the spatial range category are: the two languages can both divide space category into static and dynamic two subcategories; the selection of target and reference is of a tendency, the entity of the object is of the influencing factors in the two languages; the fictive motion expression is used to describe an inherently static scene. The expression of dynamic displacement can be classified into two distinct types: autonomousmotion events and causedmotion events. Chinese and English expression similarities and differences of the spatial range category: the same conceptual semantics expression of different elements; target and reference. Combination of reverse order; spatial dimension expression level of detail is different; different displacement sentence the path description level of detail; different methods are used to express autonomousmotion events and causedmotion events.The similarities and differences of the two languages are related to their respective linguistic system attributes; and the cognitive strategies, thinking, and cultural background of the language users are related to the non linguistic factors. Chinese is an isolated language, the lack of morphological changes, grammatical relations mainly rely on word order and grammar structure to express; English is inflectional language, rich form, semantic expression most directly or use the morphological changes of expression(e.g., tense, voice, etc.). The theory of cognitive linguistics is an effective way to explain the differences between the two languages. Speakers of two languages of the spatial cognitive reflect the common, differences in the performance of different scene space scanning modes, therefore the reflectiion on the surface level of the two languages is also different. The research conclusion can provide help for the translation and foreign language teaching.