A Contrastive Study On Metaphorical Extensions Of Spatial Locality Words In English And Chinese

As a fundamental cognitive category, space has attracted great attention of scholars in various fields, and spatial locality refers to the spatial relations between two or more objects in the world. Owing to the common physical space, the words within the category of spatial locality are constrained to a closed-class, which contains some basic concept of spatial locality, such as shang-xia, qian-hou, li-wai, and so on, no matter in what language. Furthermore, the research on metaphor can be traced back to the ancient times, and it is assumed that metaphor is not only a rhetorical method, but also a cognitive tool. Based on the bodily experiences, people establish a relationship between the unknown things and the familiar ones, by means of metaphor, in order to get to know the world. Due to the basic status of space, people always take it as the source domain, and get new metaphorical extensions through mapping onto other abstract target domains. However, the recent research on the metaphorical extensions of spatial locality has been devoid of certain systematicity at large, and there are few contrastive analysis on this issue between different cultures.From a cognitive-functional perspective, this paper conducts a contrastive research on the metaphorical extensions of three pairs of spatial locality words in English and Chinese: UP-DOWN, FRONT-BACK, IN-OUT. Based on the qualitative analysis of the three pairs of spatial locality words under concern, both from the authoritative dictionaries and reliable corpora in English and Chinese, we aim to work out the similarities and differences of their metaphorical extensions between the two languages, and attempts to give some explanations from cognitive, cultural and historical perspectives. And we come to the conclusion that the metaphorical extensions of spatial locality words in English and Chinese are both present in the target domains of TIME, STATE,SOCIAL STATUS and RELATION, and generally speaking, they display similar metaphorical extensions in each target domain. No matter in English or Chinese, within the target domain of TIME, UP and FRONT tend to express an earlier time, DOWN and BACK a later time; as for the target domain of STATE, UP and FRONT are towards active while DOWN and BACK towards negative. With the target domain of RELATION, IN tends to be intimate whereas OUT tends to express remote relations, and as far as the abstract domain of SOCIAL STATUS is concerned, UP, FRONT and IN tend to be of higher social status while DOWN, BACK and OUT of lower social status. The reason for the similarities in terms of the metaphorical extensions is that human beings are in the similar physical space and possess similar cognitive mechanisms.However, the metaphorical extensions are not all the same between English and Chinese within each target domain, because the factor of culture plays an essential role in both the evolution of human beings and the development of language, and different cultures make distinctive cognitive models and customs. As a result, people in different countries collect different experiences within different cultures in their daily life. On the other hand, the similarities of metaphorical extensions on the whole and the differences presented by each specific case are also clearly reflected in the analysis of the examples from both the dictionaries and the corpora, and this helps to justify the fact that the metaphorical extensions are produced in the process of the language in use, rather than from the internal language system itself, and the metaphorical extensions are not only a change in meaning, but also a reflection of culture.