A Cognitive Study Of Fictive Motion Expressions In Chinese

This thesis aims to analyze fictive motion expressions in Chinese and explore theunderlying mental processing mechanism. As motion events in space are one of the mostbasic experiences of humans, there is an interesting phenomenon that a stationary scene canalso be depicted as in a motion. In English, there may be a sentence like “the mountain rangegoes from Canada to Mexico”. Despite the immobile state of mountain range based onhuman’s common experience, the sentence evokes a sense of something in motion. Themountain range is depicted as in a fictive motion along the path from point A Canada to pointB Mexico. There is also similar phenomenon in Chinese. For instance, a natural Chineseexpression may be written as “在一马平川的冀北大平原，崛起一座秀丽的山，甚是珍奇”.According to people’s life experience and observation, the mountain is in a stationary state atits site. However, in this sentence the mountain is exhibited in a motion for manifestationalong a path with its current site as a goal.While many scholars have endeavored to explore the fictive motion in English, Spanish,Japanese and other foreign languages, the studies in Chinese are critically inadequate.Therefore, this study is intended to fill this gap by classifying Chinese fictive motionexpressions and clarifying their mental processes respectively. In order to answer the researchquestions, this thesis adopted Talmy’s sketch of motion events, recognition of distinguishingfeatures of fictive motion and Fauconnier’s conceptual blending theory as the theoreticalfoundations.Through the qualitative analysis of examples found in Contemporary Chinese Dictionaryand Center for Chinese Linguistics, Chinese fictive motion expressions are classified into fivedifferent categories in terms of their different values of figure, ground and path. They are the emanation type of fictive motion, the frame-relative motion, fictive motion with advent paths,fictive motion with coextension paths and fictive motion with pattern paths.Furthermore, the mental processes of different types of fictive motion are respectivelyanalyzed within the framework of Fauconnier’s conceptual blending theory. The analysisshows that the sense of motion in stationary scene is evoked by the inference mapped backfrom a blended space. Different types of fictive motion expressions all require an input spacethat reflects a motion event. However, distinctions exist in the other input space. According tothe different senses of specific sentences, different contents of the second input space areactivated. Partial structures from these two input spaces are projected onto their counterpartsfrom the other space and then mapped onto the blended space. Emergent structures appear inthe blended space for its self-contained structure with its own logic. The similarity ofstructures in these spaces allows the inference from the blended space to be projected back tothe second input space which is associated with a particular linguistic context.This thesis consists of seven chapters.Chapter one is an introduction which makes a brief overview of the whole thesis,including its research background, purpose and significance, research questions, methodologyand organization of the thesis.The following chapter is a literature review which firstly demonstrates the differentterms, definitions and classifications of fictive motion put forward by different researchers.Then psychological studies and linguistic studies on fictive motion will be discussed. Afterthe recognition of both achievements and limitations of previous studies, two researchquestions of this study are proposed.The third chapter mainly introduces the theories underpinning this thesis includingTalmy’s sketch of motion events, distinguishing features of fictive motion and Fauconnier’sconceptual blending theory. The fourth chapter demonstrates the research design of the study which involves themethodology, data collection and data analysis methods of this research.Chapter Five presents the results of data analysis. Five categories of fictive motionexpressions in Chinese are recognized and each category of fictive motion is illustrated withconcerning expressions.Chapter Six explores the underpinning conceptual blending processes of the fivedifferent categories of Chinese fictive motion expressions respectively.Finally, Chapter Seven summarizes the main findings of the research and concludes thecontribution and limitations of this study. Recommendations will also be provided for futureresearch.