Contrastive Study On The Semantics Of Locatives In English And Chinese

Spatial studies can be traced back to the ancient times where the philosophers make their own viewpoints on it and scientists make their explanations on it. The space studied in this thesis is not concerned with the physical space but the space from people’s own conceptualization. Although the relation of primary object and secondary object in the space have been classified in various forms from different linguist, locative prepositions are regarded as the appropriate words to express those relations. This thesis focuses on the study of locative prepositions that are used to indicate the static concepts of the spatial relations. In this study, relevant theories from cognitive linguists are employed. A contrastive study on the locative prepositions in English and Chinese is adopted. The locative prepositions in English and Chinese are compared in three main static spatial relations:contiguous, interior and discontiguous. In those relations, their own representative locative prepositions are chosen for the contrastive study in which an evolution of these locative prepositions in English and Chinese from literal meanings to their extended meanings are analyzed and compared. Furthermore, some reasonable explanations are given for the similarities and differences of locative prepositions in English and Chinese in terms of their spatial and metaphorical meaning. Therefore, the thesis includes four parts:the introduction, literature review, contrastive study and the conclusion.Chapter one concerns with the general introduction where the scope, the objective, methodology and data collection are mentioned. Furthermore, the significance and the thesis structure are included in it. Chapter two is the literature review which is comprised of the former studies relating to the locative prepositions and some theoretical framework on the spatial relations, reference, Figure and Ground and metaphors. Chapter three is the main part of the study which elaborates on the comparisons and contrasts of meaning of static locatives on both spatial and metaphorical senses in the three spatial relations. In the contiguous relation, the locative preposition "on" and "shang" are chosen. In the interior relation, the locative preposition "in" and "li" are used to make a comparison. In the discontiguous relation, the locative preposition presenting the concept of "front-back","qian-hou" and "north, south, east, west" and "bei, nan, dong, xi" are selected. Besides, some reasons are also included in this part. Chapter four is the conclusive part in which some main findings are concluded:in these relations there are more differences than similarities of locatives in English and Chinese with respect to their metaphorical meaning. In terms of the spatial meaning of locatives in English and Chinese, the results have to be discussed respectively. In the contiguous, interior and discontiguous relations, some spatial meanings of locatives are identical but some are not. The framework, function of "X" and have great impact on the similarities and differences of their spatial meanings. Besides, whether the locative prepositions are locative prepositional phrases or not also influence those similarities and differentiations. The reasons for these similarities and differences are closely related to three elements:cognition of people, cultural awareness and the grammatical rules for the spatial relations. In addition, some limitations for this study are also mentioned in this chapter.