English "V+Out" And Chinese "V+CHU"

A phrasal verb is a combination of a verb with an adverb or a preposition, whichtogether yield a particular new meaning. OUT is ranked as the second mostfrequently-used member among English particles. The Chinese CHU has13meaningsin use, which is complicated and confusing. The high frequency of OUT and CHUindicates their tight relationship with our daily life.The importance of phrasal verbs has drawn great attention from them. Before1980s, traditional linguistic researches focused on phrasal verbs with the same verb asthe core, trying to figure out the relationship between phrasal verbs, of which the verbis the key, and they saw an independent picture without enough internal links. After1980s, cognitive linguistic scholars such as Sinclair et al. have shedded new light onthe phrasal verbs. In order to provide a more clear understanding of the polysemousparticle, it is necessary to make a comparative study on OUT and its Chinesecounterpart CHU as used in phrasal verbs.This paper combines the quantitative research with qualitative research. Theresearch data is collected from the enormous corpus and analyzed on the basis ofcognitive theory. The two enormous corpora, namely, BNC corpus and modernChinese sub-corpus of PKU-CCL-Corpus, both of which offer on-line searchingservice, are applied in this research. After random selection and filtering the data thatare meaningless or independent of context, the author has finally selected2115instances of OUT and3424instances of CHU.The analysis of the valid data indicates some differences and similarities betweenOUT and CHU. In term of the similarities, their metaphorical meanings almostdominate all the meanings of OUT and CHU, and the image schemas of OUT andCHU are both of dynamic and result model. There are three common target domains(“tendency”,“result”, and “range”) shared by the metaphorical extensions of OUTand CHU. As for the differences, OUT is dominantly used in the static model, whileCHU is more likely to express dynamic model, involving a unique target domain(“quantity”) for its metaphorical meanings. Another big difference between OUT and CHU is the distinctive rank in percentage. In the target domains extended from thespatial meanings of OUT, the domain “state” takes up the largest proportion (51.9%),while among the metaphorical meanings of CHU, the domain of “result” ranks first interm of frequency (36.9%).Therefore, the spatial meaning of OUT is more likely tomap onto the domain of “state”, while that of CHU is more frequently mapped ontothe domain of “result” and “tendency”.The findings of this thesis not only reveal exist differences and similaritiesbetween English and Chinese cultures, but also supports Lakoff and Johnson’shypothesis that our knowledge is organized metaphorically. Besides, this research isexpected to have implications and significance for such fields as dictionary compiling,teaching and learning of polysemous particles in second or foreign languageacquisition.