The Comparative Study Of Spatial And Temporal Prepositions In Mandarin Chinese And Czech

Location and time expressions are an important part of every language. Through language people often transmit information, and these information often include information on time and location, and that's why people often have to use expressions of time and location in their speeches or texts. Different languages use their own methods of expressing spatial and temporal relations. These methods include, for example, different methods on the level of morphology, on the level of syntax or on the level of lexicology.There are languages that use temporal nouns and spatial nouns, and there are languages that use adverbs of time and adverbs of location to express spatial and temporal relations. There are also languages that use prepositional phrases with case markers and there are languages that use postpositional phrases to express spatial and temporal relations. Mandarin Chinese often uses nouns of location, postpositional phrases and"preposition + postpositional phrase"constructions to express temporal and spatial relations, while Czech, as an inflectional language, uses prepositions in combinations with nouns modified according to the case that the preposition requires and adverbs of time and location to express temporal and spatial relations.The purpose of this paper is, while using the comparative method, to find the similarities and differences in the way the spatial and temporal relations are expressed in modern Mandarin Chinese and modern Czech and point out characteristic features of these expressions in both languages. This article focuses mainly on prepositions of time and location, because the differences between these two languages are too big to consider all ways of expressing location and time. There are two reasons why the author has chosen focusing on the prepositions of time and location. Firstly, prepositional phrases are a very common way of expressing time and location in both languages. And secondly, in many languages the same preposition can often be used to introduce both the temporal and spatial phrase. Author has chosen two prepositions:"从"and"在"to make the comparison.