A Contrastive Analysis Of Expression Of Motion Events In English And Chinese

The purpose of this paper is to study the characteristics of the expression patterns of Chinese and English in the representation of motion events,with a focus on similarities in syntactic structure,event structure.In the study of features of the event,the main component of the motion event,the expression of the path component,is studied.On the basis of a contrastive study of the characteristics of English and Chinese expressions,the issue of language types in English and Chinese is discussed.This article hopes to offer help for those researches about contrastive study between Chinese and English.And according to corpus materials,it offers new opinion to the controversial problem about the typology of Chinese.At the same time,the characteristics of the directional complement in Chinese and English are deeply studied in order to provide help to Chinese and English learners.Talmy proposed the theory framework of motion event in his book--Toward a Cognitive Semantics(2000).According to the theory of Talmy(1985,2000),the languages in the world can be divided into Verb-framed language and Satellite-framed language,and Talmy classifies English and Chinese as Satellite-framed languages.Talmy's classification has prompted many scholars to study the different languages further in the world,and many scholars have also explored the types of Chinese and English languages.As for English,most scholars agree that English undoubtedly belongs to the Satellite-framed language.However,there is no agreement on the typology of Chinese.Some scholars think that modern Chinese is Verb-framed language,and some scholars think it is Satellite-framed language.In arguing which kind of language Chinese is,some scholars have suggested that Chinese be neither Verb-framed language nor Satellite-framed language,and some scholars consider it to be another Equivalent-framed language.Some scholars think it another Parallelframed language.Up to now,there is still no consensus on the typology of Chinese.Therefore,to explore the typology of Chinese is of great significance.In this paper,we first describe in detail syntactic structure and event structure and compare the similarities between the English and Chinese motion events.Meanwhile,according to the expression pattern of motion event in Chinese and English,the paper gives answer the typology of Chinese and English.This paper concludes that Chinese and English are all Satellite-framed language.This article focuses on researching the following three aspects:Firstly,this paper attempts to analyze some relevant features of syntactic structure and event structure of English and Chinese motion events based on corpus,and sums up the similarities between English and Chinese in these aspects.Secondly,through the research on the expression patterns of path components in English and Chinese motion events,this paper sums up the similarities between Chinese and English in path expression.As Chinese has a large number of verbcomplement structures,the problem of Chinese typology is so complicated.So the typology of Chinese causes great controversy.However,this paper through analysis found that Chinese is a Satellite-framed language.Thirdly,in the syntactic patterns of Chinese motion events,the structure of directional complement is a special category.This paper compares and studies the characteristics of the directional complement of English and Chinese motion events.It helps to grasp the expression features of the English and Chinese motion events.All in all,through a comparative study of the syntactic structure,event structure,we can figure out the similarities between Chinese and English in expressing various aspects of motion events.At the same time,through the comparative study,it can be concluded that English and Chinese are all Satellite-framed language.