A Cognitive Semantic Approach To English Spatial Preposition-Chinese Translation

As an old and primary word-class,prepositions have made their way into scholars' view as early as the era of traditional grammar.Spatial prepositions(SPs),the most fundamental prepositions directly derived from human beings' interaction with the outside physical world, provide the basic foundations and best thinking patterns for their related abstract senses and take the favor of more researchers.SP translation,in which mistakes often take place,is receiving more and more research attention with the strengthening of various international communications.As translation is actually the semantic conversion between the source and target language,semantics equivalence is the core of SP translation.As to the semantics of SPs,different linguistic schools hold divergent opinions.Cognitive linguistics,different from traditional linguistic schools which ignore or even deny the semantics of SPs,insists that SPs are polysemous words with multi-leveled and mutually-related senses.However,their researches on the semantics of SPs are mainly restricted to semantic construction,semantic extension and semantic acquisition,and the semantics in SP translation has rarely been touched.Moreover, researches on English SP-Chinese translation are limited to subjective summary of translation skills and the contrast of their formal differences.Although some English SP-Chinese translations are studied from the cognitive perspective,they are confined to meaning match and ignore other two indispensable semantic factors that would also affect the English SP translation:semantic structure and semantic form.Cognitive semantics,which develops based on the second generation of cognitive science,with embodied philosophy as its philosophical foundation,focuses on discussing the dialectical relationships between human beings' cognition,languages and bodily experiences, outside world,and analyzing the relationships between language and conceptual model, knowledge structure.In the process of which,semantics is put in the key position and studied from the cognitive perspectives.Image schema,one of the most important notions of CS, derived from human being's bodily experiences and conception,is recurrent and skeletal organization structure linking abstract relationships with concrete images and more complicated concepts are understood in terms of these image schemata.Due to the distinct physical environments and conceptual models,English and Chinese users form distinct spatial categories for spatial semantics.What is more,the metaphorical mapping of image schema from spatial domain to other abstract domains further enlarges the semantics of SP.Apart from that,different semantic structures and forms of the same semantics represented by SP often exists due to the divergent activation points of the same semantics between English and Chinese.All the above cognitive semantic factors bring about numerous difficulties and bewilderment for English SP-Chinese translation.Bearing in mind the shortcomings of the previous researches and the difficulties in English SP-Chinese translation,the current thesis,considering semantics as the center and breakingthrough point of the English SP translation,tries to make a cognitive semantic study on the whole semantic match process of the English SP-Chinese translation from the following three separate perspectives:meaning match,semantic structure match and semantic form match.In order to get rid of the subjective and shallow research methods,based on the cognitive nature of SP and the cognitive mechanism of semantic construction of SP,this thesis tries to make a theoretical sounded,comprehensive and systematic study which more tallies with the essence of language.Both theoretical analysis and typical or representative case analyses are applied in the thesis in an attempt to give the readers a comparatively clear and integrated cognitive process of English SP-Chinese translation and provide some potential implications for the practices and pedagogy of English SP-Chinese translation.Finally,as to the future prospects of this study,we could widen our research scope by analyzing more English SP-Chinese translations.An all-rounded and systematic study of the whole translation process will reveal the cognitive nature of English SP-Chinese translation.