A Corpus-based Comparative Study On English And Chinese Fictive Motions

Language is used to describe the physical world. As an important part of our physical world, motion phenomenon has attracted the attention of many linguists. And fictive motion is a subtype of motion expressions, which only happens in speakers’s mind or imagination. In other words, people use fictive motions to depict static objects in a moving way imagined by themselves. Researches on fictive motions will deepen our understanding on the relation between language and motions. The author firstly establishes a comparative corpus including 20 short novels and proses from English and Chinese writers respectively, and then try to find out the fictive motions in the corpus and make a comparison based on the corpus. Lastly, the thesis will explain the similarities and differences between English and Chinese fictive motions from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics.According to the research, fictive motions are pervasive both in English and Chinese, but they both have their own characteristics. Firstly, Chinese accords with Talmy’s classification of fictive motions for English as well, namely:emanation, pattern paths, frame-relative motion, advent paths, access paths, coextension. However, English and Chinese differ in their distribution of the six types. In English, emanation occurs most frequently and frame-relative motion occurs least. However, in Chinese, frame-relative motion occurs most frequently and pattern paths occurs least. Secondly, there exist some limitation on forming of fictive motions in English and Chinese, that is the necessity of path condition and exclusion of manner condition. Thirdly, the most frequently used motion types in English and Chinese are not corresponding. The top 5 motion verbs in English fictive motions are "come, run, reach, rise, draw", while the top 5 in Chinese fictive motions are“伸,爬,横,退,掠”.This thesis tries to illustrate the similarities and differences between English and Chinese fictive motions through cognitive linguistics, aiming to have a better understanding of it. As we know, motions are very common in our physical world. As fictive motions originate from people’s subjective construal of our world, it is quite reasonable that they are pervasive in languages. As for the limitation of path information and manner condition and shortage of sentences like "the mountains are approaching us" they can be explained from the principles of completeness and proximity from Gestalt psychology. In addition, the different preferences of scanning can explain the different distribution of English and Chinese fictive motions. As a matter of fact, their differences and similarities are not only related to brain conception and perception, but also to each language’s structures since human’s conception leads to similar conceptualization of experience.Theoretically, the present research not only helps find out the similarities and differences related to lexicalization, syntactic patterns and language types between English and Chinese, but also illustrates the inner features of each language. Empirically, this study not only facilitates language learners to have a better understanding of the universality and individuality between English and Chinese as well as the motivation for these differences, but also offers a new perspective for the development of the translation, language teaching and the corpus linguistics. However, more data is needed to reveal other element in motion event like motion verbs, etc, to give a better explanation for this linguistic phenomenon.