A Cognitive Corpus-based Study Of English "Deep" And Chinese "Shen(æ·±)"

Dimensional terms are one of the interesting topics in cognitive linguistic research. The present thesis is a contrastive study of dimensional adjectives"deep"and"shen深"from the cognitive perspective, aiming at exploring universality and cultural variations concerning human spatial cognition and human spatial metaphorical system.The study examines similarities and differences between"deep"and"shen深"through direct frequency contrast of their noun collocates in five semantic domains, namely spatial, temporal, color, sound, and mental states.Spatial domain is fundamental and central in human cognition. Within this domain, five categories are introduced to group the noun collocates and they are further related to human cognitive models of interpreting the world such as shape and functionality. It is found that both"deep"and"shen深"share the five categories, though cultural difference plays an important role in collocational preference. For example, in the category of"containers"English people preferably use"deep"for a wide range of small portable containers like dish, bowl, pot, pan, and cup while the Chinese tend to apply"shen深"to a number of architectures with fixed locations such as闺,宅,宫,院,楼and so on. What characterizes the examples of these five categories is that they are all three-dimensional with an interior in terms of which depth is talked about.By investigating metaphorical extensions of"deep"and"shen深", this study is subscribed to the view that metaphor is in essence a mapping of the image-schematic structure of the source domain onto that of the target domain, that spatial metaphor as a kind of image-schematic metaphor plays an indispensable role in human cognition of the world and that non-spatial reasoning is a metaphorical version of spatial reasoning inherent in the structures of image schemas. Based on the CONTAINER schema, two image schemas of DEEP/SHEN are put forward, respectively representing the positional and extensional senses of these two spatial concepts. Through both qualitative and quantitative analyses, the study has found out that the image-schematic structures of DEEP and SHEN can be mapped onto the same four target domains (time, color, sound and mental states), yet the four domains are arranged in somewhat different orders of frequency in these two languages. For both"deep"and"shen深", the domain that enjoys the highest frequency among the four is that of mental states, suggesting that DEEP and SHEN as image-schematic concepts are quite actively used to structure the domain of mental states. Their major discrepancies lie in the temporal domain and the domain of sound. The concept SHEN is more frequently used to conceptualize time while that of DEEP is more commonly used to organize the target domain of sound. The differences observed between"deep"and"shen深"are accounted for from various perspectives.The present study benefits greatly from the corpus-based method and it is empirical in nature. It utilizes authentic data drawn from two large corpora as the starting point of analysis. It represents an attempt to testify the reliability and explanatory power of the cognitive approach to metaphor with a wide range of natural data. It also tries to explore the extent to which cognitive universality and cultural variations exist across languages, through quantitative report of frequency and percentage frequency in particular. Supplement of corpus-based approach to the cognitive approach in the present thesis has resulted in analysis of a scope and reliability unmatched by many previous studies in this respect.