A Further Exploration Of "the Temporality Of English And The Spatiality Of Chinese"

Within the framework combined the Theory of Language Holography with the Notionof Inner Linguistic Form, this thesis adopts the approaches of speculation andexemplification to look into the concepts of time and space displayed in the linguisticstructures of English and Chinese, and ultimately reveal the individualized essentialdiscrepancy between English and Chinese in terms of the sentence structure and its rootcause.Based on the different cognitions of time and space held by the English and Chinesenations, Wang Wenbin (2012) aims to explore the fundamental difference between Englishand Chinese. He claims that English is a temporality-prominent language, while Chinese isa spatiality-prominent one, which can be specified as follows: English emphasizes thecoding of action information in the linguistic expressions, whose abundant lexical andmorphological approaches drive the formation of a linear sentence structure characterizedby continuity, connectivity and irreversibility. By contrast, Chinese endows the sentencestructure with a spatial orientation or arrangement, which assumes the traits of chunkiness,discreteness and reversibility. Grounded on this argument, the present study attempts toexamine Wang Wenbin’s hypothesis by tracing back to the language origins, revising therelevant notions and expatiating on the key points by examples taken from The History ofTom Jones, A Foundling and A Dream of Red Mansions. Accordingly, the major content ofthis thesis is arranged as follows: observing the temporal or spatial thinking tendency heldby the English and Chinese peopleâ†'describing the original clues about the inclinationtowards temporality or spatiality in English and Chineseâ†'demonstrating andexemplifying the temporality of English and the spatiality of Chinese in detail. Thefollowing conclusions are arrived at based on the current study: Firstly, the dissimilar preference for time and space followed by the English andChinese nations is the underlying cause for the different orientation to temporality andspatiality involved in English and Chinese. The English nation pays more attention to theresearches of time and motion, whereas the Chinese people hold a unique insight intospace, which even influences their comprehension of time. Besides, the original clues ofEnglish and Chinese witness the overall distinction concerning the linguistic temporalityand spatiality. English can trace its origin back to Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, whoseemphases are generally placed on the verbs related to time. By contrast, ancient Chineseattaches significance to the study of pictographic characters and the definition of nouns,whose imitation and classification of objects exhibit their preference for space.Secondly, English and Chinese have different representations of temporality andspatiality lying in the sentence structure. The temporality of English highlights theconsistency and completeness of the whole sentence system, which is characterized bycontinuity, connectivity and irreversibility, respectively standing for the three aspects of thesentence traits, i.e. the fundamental feature of sentence structures, the connective mannerand the resulting sentence pattern.(1) The continuity underlines the core status of thesubject-predicate construction and its agreement, which aims to realize the continuation ofsentence elements and their information through the concord of the grammatical categories,such as gender, number, case, tense, aspect, mode, etc.(2) The connectivity relies onprepositions, conjunctions, relative pronouns, relative adverbs, connective pronouns andconnective adverbs to achieve the inner connection in words, phrases and clauses.(3)Resulting from the inter-alignment of continuity and connectivity along with their adoptedapproaches, the irreversibility endows the English sentence pattern with the sequentialfeature, which is conveyed by the standardized order of the subject-predicate construction,time-related grammatical rules and the particular status of the main clause and thesubordinate clause. In comparison, the spatiality of Chinese values the characteristic ofimagery lying in the sentence structure, which is carried out by chunkiness, discretenessand reversibility.(1) The chunkiness is concerned with the relatively independentsyntactical-semantic chunky unit owing to the incompleteness of sentence elements and thecondensation of sentence structures.(2) The discreteness indicates the connective manner of the chunky units. The meaning communication of these discrete structures counts moreon the internal and external coherence than the connectives.(3) The reversibility presentsthe relatively flexible sequence of the sentence structure that is commonly seen in the SVOsentence pattern, adjective phrases or adverbial phrases and the reversible sentence.