Chinese And English Adpositions From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

Space, to be more specific, consists of the objects' cubage, dimension, shape, position, order and arrangement. This paper pays more attention to perceptual dimension of landmarks, which can be analyzed from the adpositions. Prepositions, especially the locative prepositions, have been the focus of study since they caught the attention of cognitive linguistics. In the structural linguistics, lexical forms and syntactic functions were the research focus; in the generative linguistics, the meanings of the prepositions were out of consideration; in the cognitive linguistics, the prepositions were getting a thorough study from various perspectives, for example, some studying lexical senses and contextual meanings, some looking for the connection and motivation of various senses of polysemy, some comparing English prepositions with those in other languages. In a word, prepositions can be regarded as a successful experimental field.Starting with a linguistic phenomenon, that is the same landmark in English and Chinese is conceived in different dimensions, this thesis tries to answer the following questions such as "what aspects are the same perceptual dimension and what aspects are different in terms of the same landmark; what influence may this phenomenon have on the polysemy of locative prepositions; what is the cognitive mechanism and how does it work". This thesis takes the English locative prepositions "at", "on", "in" and Chinese adpositions "在...", "在...上", "在...里" as examples to do a case study, by using Trajector-Landmark and image schema as the theoretical foundation. Based on the perceptual dimension of landmark, this study classifies the similarities and differences of perceptual dimension of landmarks and hackles a clear extension procedure of adpositions from spatial domain to other domains.Based on the Chinese-English Corpus of Beijing Foreign Language University (CEPC for short), this study retrieves English-Chinese and Chinese-English data including''在…(上)/(里)",describes its similarities and differences as to perceptual dimension of landmarks. The similarities are concluded:as to the kinds of spatial and functional relationships between TR and LM, two-dimensional and three-dimensional LMs are the most, and next come zero-dimensional LMs and one-dimensional LMs are the least. It is because the interaction between two-dimensional and three-dimensional LMs and human being is the most; LMs can be conceived as adjacency ones, but seldom discontinuous dimensional ones, which is determined by the perceptual extension of LMs'shape. The differences include the spatial and metaphorical senses of adpositions, which are explained from the cognitive and syntactic perspectives and its conclusions are as follows:1. Cognitively speaking, the reason for the difference of TR-LM image schema of spatial relation is that there are different ways of construing LM, with difference in specificity and selection; because of the difference in conceptualizing functions of dimension, the same adposition exists different extensional meanings.2. Syntactically speaking, the constructional characteristic of spatial expression is different, that is, preposition plus LM plus locative word in Chinese and preposition plus LM in English. The former is a closed construction, therefore, LM is limited by verbal interface and the amount of information, and on the contrary, the latter is open. This phenomenon results in the disparity in the metaphorical meanings of locative words and is one of the reasons for using fewer prepositions but more other substitutions in the Chinese-English translation.3. Culturally speaking, owing to the difference in the artifacts and the emotion connoted by spatial relations, the locative words are different.