A Cognitive And Contrastive Study Of Motion Verb Walk(Zou) In English And Chinese

On the basis of Talmy’s theory of motion events, this thesis tries to explore the similarities and differences in motion events expressions with motion verb walk between English and Chinese from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics. The research questions involved are:1) explore the expressions of motion events with the motion verb walk in English and Chinese. In particular, to examine how Manner verbs and Path verbs are used in these two languages; 2) what the similarities and differences in motion events with motion verb walk between English and Chinese are and what the causes are.This thesis draws support from corpus-based approach and contrastive study. The Chinese corpus is contemporary Chinese corpus in CCL(Center for Chinese Linguistics PKU). The English corpus is the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA) for contrast, which is the largest freely-available corpus of English in the world. In order to guarantee the accuracy of the study, the results and example sentences come from these two corpuses.This thesis respectively examines the expressions of motion verb walk in English and Chinese, especially the expressions of Manner and Path information. The results show the main similarities:1)English and Chinese have the corresponding manner verbs, such as walk and Zou(Chinese word for walk), and they share the prototype meaning in the semantic category; 2) the Path information could be consistent and both English and Chinese make its Path information quite clear. The study also shows the differences:1)there are differences in the number of walk-related motion verbs. Chinese native speakers prefer to use adverbials as Manner to modify Zou for motion events expressions while English native speakers get used to using manner verbs related to walk; 2) In Chinese, the Path satellites could be directly used as main verb while English could never do that. Chinese only has one Path satellite in a single clause while English could have more than one; 3) For usage occasions, walk-related motion verbs in Chinese are mostly formal and seldom used in daily life while walk-related motion verbs in English are not.This thesis also explores the causes that lead to similarities and differences: on the one hand, there are differences in thinking patterns between English and Chinese; On the other hand, Chinese Zi(Chinese word for word) has a certain influence on integration of motion events. Last but not the least, the limitations and suggestions for further study are discussed as well.