| As an important part of verbs, posture verbs play a vital role in the linguisticresearch both in English and Chinese. However, the limited researches into posture verbsfocus on their semantic and syntactical aspects, and cognitively oriented or at leastcognitively compatible studies are rare. This thesis focuses on the analysis of posture verbstand in English and li (立) in Chinese, revealing similarity and dissimilarity in theirmeaning and usage. The present research is quantitative as well as qualitative. Firstly,based on the authoritative database of Brown and CCL corpora, this paper explores thesimilarities and disparities between stand and li in terms of frequency of use, usage andcollocation, thereby offering a thorough and macroscopic understanding of the two words.Secondly, a microscopic analysis in light of grammaticalization theory is conducted ontheir semantic extensions. More importantly, in light of image schema theory, this papermaintains that the relationship between every lexical item of posture verbs stand and li isnot arbitrary. There is close correlation between body, thinking and lexical meaning. Theextension of their lexical meaning is originated from people’s body experience in theobjective world. By means of a quantitative case study, this paper explores the potentialrationale of image schema and supports the claim that the extension of lexical item is to acertain degree determined by people’s body experience. What follows is a detailedcomparison between stand and li, which reveals that image schema, contain culturaldifferences and exert influence on the semantic extensions of the same posture words indifferent languages.This research puts forward a new approach to cognitive studies of posture verbs inEnglish and Chinese. We hope this research can pave the way for more useful and fruitfulresearches into posture verbs. |
