A Comparative Study Of English And Chinese Personal Narrative Discourses From A Cognitive Perspective

Personal narrative discourse is the recording and retrospection of the narrative agent's personal experience,which highly restores the narrative agent's psychological recognition of self-identity and the physical experience of events.It is bound not only by specific culture and narrative tradition,but also by personal style which results in diversified discourse patterns.That is why personal narrative discourse has always been in the blind spot of narrative discourse researches.However,compared with literary narrative discourse which uses a variety of writing techniques to strengthen the narrative effect,a research on personal narrative discourse can be a better reflection of how people construe events as well as the relationship between men and events.Taking structural or functional theoretical perspectives,most of the previous studies on narrative discourse have explored the conceptual and structural features of narrative discourse(fictions in particular).There is a relatively small body of cognitive studies,let alone a systematic cognitive exploration of the conceptual and formal structure of personal narrative discourse.The lack of comparative studies across languages on the features of personal narrative discourse and deep motivations underlying the features further widen the research gap.With both qualitative and quantitative data analysis,the objective ofthe present study is to apply Cognitive Grammar Theory,Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Idealized Cognitive Model Theory to a systematic study on personal narrative discourse by exploring within the self-built database of English and Chinese life stories selected from autobiographies,online journals and blogs.Specifically,the study is revolved around the following four research questions:1)What is the conceptual structure and what is the formal structure of personal narrative discourse?2)What are the conceptual and linguistic features of English and Chinese personal narrative discourse?3)What are the similarities and differences of English and Chinese personal narrative discourse?4)What are the motivations beneath the similarities and differences of English and Chinese personal narrative discourse?The major findings of the study are listed as follows:First,we contend that the personal narrative discourse is a symbolic unit with a bipolar construction of discursive meaning and its linguistic form.We can fractionize the personal narrative discourse into personal narrative agent and personal narrative event.The former is the initiator of narrative act which can be divided into narrating agent and experiencing agent.The latter is the product of narrative act,which can be further divided into action and state motivation,referential and reflectivetrajectory,now and then finale.The linguistic form of personal narrative discourse can be stratified into macro-,meso-and micro-levels.The macro structure is composed of narrative commencement,narrative enroute and narrative denouement which are represented in paragraphs or paragraph clusters in the discourse.The meso level is represented in narrative clauses or clause clusters which are abstract,orientation,complicating action,evaluation,resolution and coda.The micro level is represented in the words or phrases of the narrative clause in which the narrative agent can be found in its corresponding subject nouns or pronouns.Secondly,through both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data,we find the English prototypical personal narrative discourse elements are experiencing agent,action motivation,referential trajectory and “now” finale while the Chinese prototypical conceptual elements are experiencing agent,state motivation,referential trajectory and “then”finale.The causal relationship is the prototypical sequence in both languages.Formally,we summarize the salience chain on macro-,mesoand micro-levels by the frequency of each formal component.Thirdly,we find the similarities and differences in regard to the conceptual and formal features in English and Chinese personal narrative discourse.Conceptually,the similarities lie in the shared fuzzy boundaries between conceptual elements,shared prototypical componentsand sequence and shred metaphorical motivation in the conceptual emergence.The major differences are: Chinese personal narrative discourse presents a higher level subjectivity and dynamicity;Chinese takes the necessary causal relation as the prototypical sequence whereas English takes definite causal relation as prototype.Formally,we find the similarities and differences lie in:(1)Though the macro-level structure“Narrative commencement—narrative enroute—narrative denouement” is shared,a higher proportion in Chinese enroute can be found;(2)The prototypical meso-level component is complicating actions but a higher proportion of orientation and lower frequency of abstract,evaluation and coda can be found in Chinese personal narrative discourse;(3)The first person narrator on the micro-level enjoys the prototypical position in both languages,but a higher level of implicit 1st person pronoun in Chinese personal narrative discourse.Fourthly,we find that,culturally,different understanding of self-identity and the causality and temporality,different dependence on the contextual clue and different intellectual traditions motivate the different patterns in personal narrative discourse.Cognitively,Chinese personal narrative conceptualizers tend to use optimal viewing arrangement and sequential scanning to process the narrating event while English conceptualizers construe the events in the egocentric viewing arrangement together with summary scanning.The Chinese personalnarrative discourse shows a higher level of iconicity in both narrative rhythm and causal link.This study deepens and expands the researches on English and Chinese personal narrative discourses,revealing both the language universals and the cultural and cognitive specificities.It also proposes a new perspective for the comparative study on Chinese and English discourses.Hopefully,the research results can be applied to classroom teaching of English writing and translation,providing the language learners with theoretical enlightenment and practical techniques on personal narrative discourse.