A Cognitive Linguistics Approach To The Grammatical Functions Of The Temporal And Spatial Systems In English And Chinese

Cognitive linguistics that has emerged from within the modern interdisciplinary study known as cognitive science, is a relatively new school of linguistics, and one of the most innovative and exciting approaches to the study of language and thought.Based on the embodied philosophy (answer.com, 2007) that usually refers to a set of arguments proposed by Lakoff and his various co-authors, which suggest that the mind can only be well understood by taking into account the body and the more primitive underpinnings of the mind, cognitive linguistics is a school that combines linguistics and cognitive science, which aims to provide accounts of language that mesh well with current understandings of the human mind. The guiding principle behind it is that language use must be explained with reference to the underlying mental processes.In its narrow sense cognitive linguistics is divided into two main areas of study: cognitive semantics and cognitive approaches to language grammar. Croft and Cruse (2002: 1) see three hypotheses as guidance to the cognitive approach to language:●language is not an autonomous cognitive faculty●grammar is conceptualization●knowledge of language emerges form language useThe first principle is opposed to the well known hypothesis of generative grammar that language is an autonomous cognitive faculty or module, separated from nonlinguistic cognitive abilities. The second principle is opposed to truth-conditional semantics, in which a semantics metalanguage is evaluated in terms of truth and falsity related to the world. The third principle is opposed to reductionist tendencies in both generative grammar and truth conditional semantics, in which maximally abstract and general representations of grammatical form and meaning are sought and many grammatical and semantic phenomena are assigned to the periphery.There are three purposes in the present thesis. The first is to reveal the existence of and interpret the temporal and spatial systems of the two languages from a theoretical view in cognitive linguistics. This purpose is achieved on the basis of the working principle of cognitive domain. The second is to reveal the functions of the temporal system in syntactic structures of the two languages, which is governed and illustrated by principles of iconicity, and then to reveal the functions of the spatial system in prepositions and syntactic structures of the two languages, which is governed and illustrated by principles of image schema and figure and ground. The third purpose is to find out the way time and space functions are transformed which is governed and illustrated by the metaphor principle and the grammaticalization principle.Through the comparative study of the temporal systems of English and Chinese with the iconicity principle we find that Chinese syntactic structure is more consistent in following the temporal sequence than English due to the lack of such means as verb variations indicating tense and temporal conjunctions demonstrating syntactic sequence. Through the comparative study of the spatial systems of English and Chinese with the principles of image schema and figure and ground we find that English spatially static prepositions are more specific in dimension than Chinese prepositions, and Chinese spatially dynamic prepositions are usually derived from their deverbals, and that compared with English, Chinese is more tolerable to spatial gaps in sentence structures, namely, the subjects or objects or even both the subjects and the objects of Chinese sentences are more frequently omitted than English ones due to the different life experience of the two peoples and the distinct characteristics of the two languages. Finally in the two languages the temporal and spatial systems can be reciprocally transformed, though generally speaking people often use the space concept to express time related semantics because the spatial system is more basic and more concrete than the temporal system, therefore the former has the priority to be recognized and used.The grammatical functions of either spatial or temporal system are boundless as the research into the cognitive linguistics is deepening. Sooner or later with more and more research efforts and results a revolution in grammar study is going to happen.