A Contrastive Study Of Spatial Expressions In English, Chinese And Japanese

Everything in the world is in a certain space; therefore, to locate the spacerelation between objects is an extremely important aspect of recognizing the objectiveworld. When human begin to cognize the world, they first focus on the position andmovement around their environment. Spatial expression is a linguistic form based onthe abstract representation of an objective world through human conceptualprocessing. Owing to the similarities and dissimilarities of physical space, cognitivepattern, culture background and so on, the spatial expressions in different languagescontain some disparities. Scholars have achieved much in the studies of spatialexpression from different perspectives, while there are still some problems that needto be studied. This thesis breaks through the limitations of the previous studies andmakes a research of spatial expressions in English, Chinese and Japanese from theperspective of contrastive linguistics and cognitive linguistics.The spatial relation in language expression can be understood as a kind offigure-ground relation. By probing the cognition of located object and referenceobject in English, Chinese and Japanese. The author finds that people tend to usefixed thing to serve as reference object rather than unfixed thing. Larger thing ratherthan smaller one is more often used as reference object; the holistic part is relativelymore inclined to act as reference object than the part; things appear relatively earliertend to be more used as a reference object than things that appear later. When peoplecognize the spatial relation between located object and reference object in English，Chinese, and Japanese, each language shares some basic spatial concept systems.There are similarities, because people in the world have some basic spatial conceptsystems and share similar environmental factors, and so on.As for how to establish contact between language coding and space expression,different languages have different means. From the analyses, we know that in eachlanguage there are a series of words which are employed to express the direction and location. The expression of a variety of spatial relations is usually achieved by usingspatial prepositions in English; Preposition and locality are mainly employed todemonstrate the interaction between located object and reference object in Chinese;the basic spatial relation is expressed by the use of grid particle in Japanese, andsometimes the locality is also employed.The syntactic functions of spatial expression are different in English, Chineseand Japanese. The spatial expressions can serve as different sentence elements.Preposition phrase which locates spatial relation in English can serve as a sentenceconstituent, namely, subject, attributive, object complement, predicative, andadverbial of place; The spatial expression in Chinese can act as a sentence element,including subject, object, attributive, complement and adverbial of place; The basicsentence structure in Japanese is topic–comment. The spatial expression in Japanesecan be used in a sentence to serve as attributive, complement and topic. A conclusioncan be drawn that the differences of cognition and understanding on spatial relation,to some extent, result in the different spatial expressions in English, Chinese andJapanese. Spatial expression is not only universal but also language and culturerelevant.