A Contrastive Study Of Figure/Ground Orders In Chinese And English

Previous studies on figure/ground orders in language conclude that English is dominated by figure-before-ground order while Chinese, ground-before-figure order. This conclusion is believed to evidence a contrastive conceptualization process of figure/ground between the English and the Chinese. This argument, however, fails to govern many language structures and to illustrate why the two peoples differ so much in this universal cognitive ability. Our study shows that both figure/ground orders exist in English and Chinese. Each order mirrors one phase of our conceptualization of figure/ground alignment and fulfills a distinctive pragmatic function. Ground-before-figure language expressions reflect how we scan for a figure and answer"what is there(the ground)?"; figure-before-ground language expressions reflect how we specify a perceived figure and answer"where is it(the figure)?".According to this framework, we start from a ground to perceive a figure, a process linguistically materialized in a ground-before-figure order; after the figure is perceived, our conceptualizing process may diverge into two possible directions: (1) we may describe where the figure is, linguistically in a figure-before-ground order; or (2) we may start from the perceived figure, using it as a ground, to locate a new figure in the next ground/figure level.This two-phase segregation hypothesis has three influences: (1) it can offer a unified explanation for figure/ground orders in both English and Chinese; (2) the figure/ground conceptualization seems to be more universal in nature than contrastive, at least between English and Chinese; (3) both figure/ground orders are in line with the known-to-unknown information flow in a context.