Cognitive Study Of Motion Event Representation

As motion is the fundamental experience in human life, every language needs to express motion events. In addition, motion domain may be mapped onto other domains. Therefore, researches into motion events can provide a window to see relationship between language and cognition. This dissertation is to analyze linguistic forms and conceptual structures in English and Chinese motion events, in order to find cognitive rules in understanding motion events. By comparative study of English and Chinese motion events, this dissertation testifies whether languages with different lexicalization patterns have the same conceptual structure in motion event representation. Based on Talmy’s motion event frame and dichotomy typology theory, as well as Slobin’s trichotomy typology theory, this thesis presumes that English and Chinese motion event representations have different lexicalization patterns. However, looking from Jackendoff’s conceptual structure theory, the inner cognition towards the world is universal. That is to say, conceptual structures of English and Chinese motion events should be similar. Through corpus analysis based on the English and Chinese versions of a famous novel Harry Porter and the Goblet of Fire, this study finds very exciting results which are in accordance with the author’s presumption. That is, English and Chinese motion event representations are different in lexicalization patterns, but similar in conceptual structures. However, this dissertation still has unavoidable drawbacks. Firstly, the quantity of the corpus is small; secondly, the corpus only covers two languages, which means the results can not represent the situation for all languages in the world. Nevertheless, the research still has great significance for English and Chinese language learners.