A Comparison Of Space Metaphor Between Russian And Chinese

Space metaphor can be regarded as a process in which people use clear and detailed space experience to construct complex and abstract concepts. It is a means of cognition based on human knowledge of space. Human cognition derives straightly from daily physical experience. A universality of cognitive concept is present, since the physical experiences of all the nations are identical. However, differences must be observable among metaphorical systems of various cultural backgrounds. Then, one may wonder what type of metaphorical systems have been established in Russian and Chinese respectively, since the two nations are under conditions of similar space experience, though influenced by distinctive language, cultural, and value systems. Questions of similar nature such as differences of the two types of space metaphorical systems, and the cause of these differences can be forwarded as well. The answer of all these questions requires detailed study and comparison. This thesis attempts to compare and analyze the space metaphorical systems of Russian and Chinese and to present differences between the spaces metaphorical systems of the two languages from perspective of cognition. The ultimate aim, however, is to set the correspondence, similarity, and differences of the two languages and to discuss the cause of such differences. In addition, an attempt is made to further understand the relationship between space metaphorical cognition on one hand, and language, culture, national psychology, and human reasoning on the other. By doing this work, the author hopes to complement and improve the research and study of space metaphor, which is believed reflect the basic human cognitive law. The space prepositions in Russian constitute a closed system. This article attempts to find the differences between Russian and Chinese in terms of space metaphor through comparing space prepositions such as на,над,сверх,сверху,ловерх,лод,вниэу,в,вне,внутри,внутрь,вперди,поэади,сэади,перед,эа and space adjectives such as левь(?)й правь(?)й in Russian on one hand, and the location words in Chinese such as 上,下, 前,后,里, 外,左 and 右 on the other. Russian is a typical inflectional language while Chinese is an analytic language. In addition, the space prepositions in Russian exist merely for functional usage, while the location words in Chinese are subcategory of noun and they are notational in nature. Namely, the space prepositions of Russian and the location words in Chinese belong to different grammatical categories. Therefore, the comparison made in this thesis is not done from perspective of lexicology. On the contrary, such comparison should be expanded to the functional and conceptual level. It is generally believed...