Cognitive Contrast Research On Nouns Of Locality In Chinese And Spacial Prepositions In English

As a new way of explaining lingual phenomena, Cognitive Linguistics developed rapidly in the West especially in America since the late twentieth Century.Metaphor is an important means for the humans to know the world. What’s more, spatial metaphor plays an especially important role in the construction of human’s abstract conceptions among all metaphors. This paper is to find out the spatial cognitive semantic meanings and the metaphor extending paths of English nouns of locality "at""on""in" and Chinese nouns of locality "Shang""Li" through analysis on real language materials, to compare these words of the two languages to see to what extent they are the same and different, and meanwhile to provide some evidence for the formal spatialization hypothesis put forward by Lakoff.We preliminarily come to conclusions as follows by analysing real language materials:(1)In Chinese the noun of locality "Shang" is mainly projected to express "abstract scope" or "aspect"."Li" is projected to express "thought""feeling""view""content""state" and so on.(2)In English the noun of locality "at" is projected to express "institution""time""activity""number" and so on."On" is projected to express "aspect of sth""pressure""sustenance""state" and so on."In" is projected to express "time""abstract scope""process""state" and so on.(3)The cognitive semantic meanings of the nouns of locality in both English and Chinese are generally consistent, but there are also some inconsistent cases in concrete language expressions.