A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Localizers 'Qian/Hou' On Spatial And Temporal Domains

Space is the basic category in human beings' cognition.Many other concepts develop themselves based on the space category,including the concept of time.The localizers in Chinese and the spatial prepositions in English are the basic tool to express spatial relations.The theoretical framework of the thesis bases on Levinson's spatial frames of reference and Lakoff's TIME AS SPACE metaphor.And it takes Modern Chinese Dictionary,Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary,online dictionary Kingsoft PowerWord,the website of Center for Chinese Linguistic Peking University,and the website of Corpus of Contemporary American English as the data sources.Some examples are quoted from other researchers.The thesis attempts to conduct spatial and temporal analysis on Chinese and English localizers 'qian' and 'hou'.There are three subtypes in Levinson's spatial frames of reference,which are intrinsic frame of reference,relative frame of reference and absolute frame of reference.The Figure-Ground theory in Talmy's studies is extremely important in spatial frames of reference.The intrinsic frame of reference is an object-centered coordinate system which is determined by the inherent features of the ground according to which to ascertain the spatial relation between figure and ground.The relative frame of reference is based on the observer's viewpoint,so it is a viewer-centered coordinate system.Absolute frame of reference locates figure and ground by judging from the cardinal directions.Levinson's spatial frames of reference help to analyze Chinese and English 'qian'and 'hou' in spatial domain.Chinese localizers 'qian' and 'hou' can both refer to the concepts in spatial domain but also in temporal domain.The same goes to English 'qian' and 'hou',but there are several pairs of prepositions corresponding to that in Chinese.TIME AS SPACE metaphor will be employed in temporal analysis.The TIME AS SPACE metaphor includes moving-time model and moving-ego model.In moving-time model,time is regarded as river,flowing from future to past with the ego or observer stationary.In moving-ego model,time is static with observer moving on the time axis from past to future.Among each of the models,there are front-to-future orientation and front-to-past orientation.Based on this,the similarities and differences will be analyzed in spatial and temporal domain.Through the research,the three kinds of frames of reference have been adopted in both Chinese and English expressions and examples.Only two of them are used in analyzing the localizers 'qian'and 'hou'.But it can explain the phenomenon of 'qian'and 'hou' in spatial domain effectively.In temporal domain,the differences are obvious in TIME AS SPACE metaphor between Chinese and English 'qian' and 'hou'.It is more natural to adopt moving-ego metaphor in English,while Chinese prefers the moving-time metaphor.The expressions in Chinese usually use front-to-past orientation,and English is on the contrary.The analysis between Chinese and English 'qian' and 'hou' can effectively explain the similarities and differences in spatial and temporal domain.