A Contrastive Study Of Path Expressions Of Motion Event In English And Chinese Language

The problem of “meaning-form” has always been one of the hot topics in cognitive linguistics.Leonard Talmy elaborates this issue from the point of view of motion event.Based on Talmy's theoritical framework of motion event,taking a comparative method,this thesis tries to find out the similarities and differences about path expressions in motion event between English and Chinese.In Talmy's lexicalization pattern of motion event,he states that,according to the representation way of the core component “path”,languages across the world can be divided into two broad categories: the satellite-framed languages and the verb-framed languages.Talmy classifies both English and Chinese as the satellite-framed languages.In other words,path is mainly expressed by satellites in these two languages.Besides,The concept of “path” in English and Chinese can also be expressed by prepositions,adverbs and verbs.Because there is a basic category in human cognition that makes different languages have the same characteristics in conveying the same concept.However,these path expressions do not correspond one by one,nor do they have the same distribution in sentence construction.What's more,the research shows that the differences of path expressions between English and Chinese are more prominent.The major divergences are:(1)most of the Chinese path expressions overlap with the verbs,while most of the English path expressions overlap with the prepositions.When expressing the notion of “path”,English uses “holistic scanning”,conceptualizing “path” as a static situation,whereas Chinese uses “sequential scanning”,conceptualizing “path” as a process,so that English is inclined to use prepositions,while Chinese usually uses verbs;(2)when expressing an event including several paths,English generally uses a series of prepositions.Because it is limited to the subject-predicate consistency,a clause in English can not exist multiple perspectives,while Chinese allows more than one perspective to occur simultaneously so that Chinese usually uses continuous verbs;(3)path prepositions in Chinese are flexible and can appear in front of verbs or behind verbs,while path prepositions inEnglish are generally located behind the verbs;(4)English has a syntactic thinking way,so it is apt to use a syntactic word.But Chinese is used to be an analytic thinking way and it is prone to use an analytic expression,so a word in English may be translated into a phrase or a sentence in Chinese;(5)the English pay attention to the study of objective things,while the Chinese emphasizes the development of human beings,so in the selection of path words,the use of Deictic in Chinese is more common.