A Contrastive Study Of The Representation Of Direction In English And Chinese Motion Events

With the cases selected from Runaway by Alice Munro and its Chinese version translated by Li Wenjun, the present paper contrasts the representation of direction in English and Chinese motion events. It mainly focuses on the lexical devices and types of these directed motion events. Moreover, the factors behind the similarities and differences in representing direction of motion are analyzed in the present paper.By collecting and classifying data in Runaway and its Chinese version, the author finds that when representing direction of motion, the lexical devices normally applied are verbs, nouns, preps and advs, both in English and in Chinese. In English, the most common used lexical category representing direction is preps, taking up about 66.94%, and the second one is verbs, about 20.75%. Advs encoding direction take up 8.81% and nouns take up 3.5%. Moreover, more than 82% of the preps are used as Sats in English, which take up about 54.96% of the total cases. In Chinese,80% of the words representing direction of motion are verbs. Besides verbs, nouns coding direction take up 9.17%, preps,9.14% and advs,1.66%. Among the verbs coding direction of motion,52.49% of them are placed as Sats to verbs, that is to say, in Chinese, Sats representing direction take up 42%.Moreover, there is no big difference in the distribution of percentages of self-contained motion events, caused motion events and autonomous motion events between English and Chinese on the whole. In English, the percentages of these three types of motion are 4.89%, 28.49%, and 66.62%, and in Chinese, the percentages are 4.68%,26.16% and 69.16%. However, the percentages of these types of motion are not always the same in different lexical devices. When verbs encode direction of motion events,11.78% of the motion events are self-contained motion events in English, and 4.51% in Chinese. As to nouns encoding direction of motion, the percentages of autonomous motion events are 75% in English and 67.07% in Chinese. When it comes to preps encoding direction of motion, the percentages of these types of motion in English are quite different from those in Chinese. The percentages of caused and autonomous motion events are 40.38% and 57.31% in English, and 16.94% and 78.22% in Chinese.The factors behind the similarities and differences could be cognitive mechanisms, language systems and translator’s influences. Since the cognitive blending ability is ubiquitous to us human beings and the categories representing direction are similar in English and Chinese, there are many similarities in representing direction in English and Chinese. Viewing the words representing direction of motion belong to one category, the prototype of this category is preps in English and directional verbs in Chinese. English is a stative language, and it shows a preponderance of preps tendency, so preps are the most frequently used ones representing direction of motion. Chinese is a dynamic language, and it shows a preponderance of verbs tendency. Verbs play a dominant role in direction representation. It is also found that all the lexical devices in directed motion events are used to code a certain aspect or some aspects of the direction vector both in English and in Chinese. Furthermore, the translator decides the choices of words and sentence structures, and his aesthetic ability and knowledge might also influence his translating style and methods.The present paper is a systematic study on the representation of direction in English and Chinese motion events, and the preferences in representing direction of motion are presented. This lays a solid foundation for future study on motion events and the translation of motion events.