A Contrastive Study On Spatial Words In English And Chinese

Space, which includes spatial relationship and spatial category, is one kind of myriad forms about categories and relationships in objective world and human society. It plays an extremely important role in realizing the world. As is known to us, the intellectual history of human beings is somewhat a constant perception progress to the world. One of the cognitive styles of crucial importance is that, for thousands of years of cultural collision and integration, people have long been accustomed to understand the various abstract non-spatial category and relationship through a reflection from non-spatial relationship or objects into spatial category. This gradual formation of cognitive style is defined as a metaphorical cognition in this research.In recent decades, the proliferation of computers has accelerated the rapid development of corpus linguistics and provides an entirely new research method for linguistic study. The objects of corpus linguistic research are real language data. We can analyze a large number of linguistic phenomena from a macro perspective to find the rules of language use and conduct lexical analysis, grammatical analysis, discourse analysis, etc. through the probabilistic method. In the theoretical framework of cognitive semantics, this study is exactly based on this approach, and tries to make a comparison between the basic spatial words shang/xia(上/下) in Chinese and the corresponding words above, over, on, up, under, down and below in English. For lack of space, however, the thesis analyses the chosen spatial words from five aspects, namely, quantity, state, time, scope and social relationship.With the corpus-based approach, this thesis draws a brief conclusion at last, i.e. the cognition about spatial words in English and Chinese are different. There are differences far more than similarities. The similarities show the universality of human cognition experience, yet the wide differences reflect its specificity respectively. Western culture and Chinese culture differences are the inevitable results of different world view, language view, customs, geographical conditions, cognitive orientation and so on. Furthermore, this might be one of the reasons why the relationships of Chinese and English spatial words present the phenomenon of one-to-many. Firstly, whether in English or in Chinese, its significance is basically corresponding when expressing the quantity domain, which depends on the physical reactions exhibited from floating up or down. Secondly, when expressing the state domain, shang/xia(上/下) in Chinese is based on the same physical experience, while it is more creative in English. Thirdly, the spatial words in English are relatively deficient than Chinese to indicate the domain of time. Fourthly, when expressing the domain of scope, the spatial words are vague that attach great importance to shang/xia(上/下) but makes little of li/wai(里/外) in Chinese, yet it pays much attention to “whether there is an adherent relationship or not” and is more accurate in English. At last, when expressing social status, the spatial words imply the meaning of comparison in English but not in Chinese. This study will help us to understand the relationship between metaphorical cognition and national psychology, thinking model, culture etc., and provide some inspirations and references for foreign language teaching, second language acquisition, translation teaching and research, etc.