| The notion of space enjoys special importance in philosophy. Space, as is physically defined, reflects the relation of coexistence and separation of the objects. In other words, space consists of the objects' cubage, dimension, shape, position, order and arrangement. In linguistic study, spatial relation is the collocation of two main components: the objects and the spatial words.With the development of cognitive semantics in constructing and understanding human experiences, the study concerning the cognitive meaning of spatial words has become more and more important in cognitive science. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) have testified that more than one factor hinder the understanding of the language, namely, objective facts, bodily experience, the cognition of the world and psychological basis, and etc. Since English and Chinese speakers have different national characteristics, their cognitive patterns and styles differ accordingly. The present thesis tries to make a contrastive analysis of the cognitive aspects of spatial words in English and Chinese languages.Corpus linguistics and corpus-based study have been booming in western countries with the application of the computerized corpora. Although scholars at home and abroad pay much attention to spatial words, the corpus-based study of spatial words is far from being enough. Foreign scholars have described spatial words with metaphorical meaning only. Most domestic scholars have made inadequate study in the comparison of English and Chinese languages in that they are confined to the corpus-based linguistic study of Chinese spatial words. Given this fact, the present thesis regards the corpus-based approach as a breakthrough and tends to analyze spatial words in English and Chinese in terms of their...
|
PDF Full Text Request