| Since the1970s and1980s, researches on motion event both abroad and at home haveshown an ever-increasing tendency. Metaphor, as one of the basic cognitive tools of human being,often uses the specific concept of motion to help us understand the abstract activities and objectsof humankind, and form knowledge about the world as well as ourselves. Therefore, we shouldnot ignore the existence of metaphorical motion event (MME). However, contrasted toprototypical motion event, studies of MME are relatively few.Based on the previous studies on motion event, this thesis intends to summarize thecharacteristics and usages of MME considering of the great importance of metaphor as well asmovement in human cognition and in language expressions, with the aim to make a supplementand correction for the research of motion event and language typology. It plans to discuss MMEfrom the following three aspects: first, to analyze the similarities and differences of targetdomains which are constructed by space motion and of domain mapping processes involved inmetaphors; second, to talk about the differences of the specific representations of motion verbs inEnglish and Chinese metaphorical motion event expressions (MMEEs); third, to analyze thetypological similarities and differences of English and Chinese metaphorical motion events(MMEs) and try to find out the typology status of Chinese.This thesis mainly adopts Talmy’s (1985,1991,2000) theory of motion event and theory ofconceptual metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) as its theoretical framework, andtakes a method of both quantitive and qualitative research and focus on qualitative research.Numbers as well as detailed analysis are collected to investigate the different mapping types anddifferent lexicalization patterns in English and Chinese MMEEs.7novels each of differentsubjects and with rich metaphorical expressions from English and Chinese are selected and25sentences which expresses MME from each book are chose. These350sentences are firstcategorized according to different target domains and specific mapping process, and thennumbers and types of motion verbs in these sentences are summarized and the specificdifferences in motion verbs of each type are analyzed.The analysis shows that English and Chinese are much similar in MMEEs:(1) the targetdomains that are conceptualized by space motion as well as the types of metaphorical mappingsin English and Chinese languages show close crosslinguistic similarity;(2) for the lexicalizationpatterns of metaphorical motion verbs (MMVs) in English and Chinese, both English andChinese have a large amount of verbs that encode Motion+Manner information, and a relativelysmall set of path verbs. However, many differences existed:(1) crosslinguistic variabilities arefound to be strongly expressed in the source domain, as English makes more elaborate lexical distinctions in the manner dimension of the MME;(2) though the superficial similar in mannerverbs and path verbs in the two languages, analysis showed that there are detailed differences inthe specific use of them. For example English has richer manner verbs to show the elaboratelexical distinction of manner than Chinese, while path verbs are little used in the MMEEs. Butpath verbs in Chinese are used frequently and functions more importantly than English.Typological study of the two languages showed that Chinese is not a typical satellite-framedlanguage as English and it is more likely an equipollently-framed language. This finding revisedTalmy’s dichotomy classification of language typology. And this revision is useful to the study oftypological status of Chinese. |
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