Cognitive Study Of English And Chinese Virtual Displacement Expression

Motion phenomenon is an important part of our physical world.In recent years,it has aroused attention of many scholars.As a significant subfield of motion expressions,fictive motion refers to a kind of motion phenomenon which only exists in people's mind or imagination.It also means that a motion verb is used to describe an inherently static scene.Adopting fictive motion as target of study and making the best use of large database which would be mainly collected from Peking University CCL Corpus,British National Corpus(BNC)and some famous literature works,we try to find out the similarities and differences that these two languages might demonstrate in fictive motion expressions.We also aim to contribute reasonable explanations from the perspective of relative theories from cognitive linguistics.By selecting the Motion Event as the theoretical foundation,the thesis adopts Figure,Ground,Path and Manner as the constants and makes a comparison of the way the English and Chinese fictive motion encode these conceptual elements.The thesis has indicated that fictive motion expressions is a common phenomenon widely existing in English and Chinese with exhibiting properties and singularities.The similarities mainly reside in two aspects.Firstly,there exist some limitations on forming of fictive motions both in English and Chinese.In other words,Path information must be concluded in fictive motion,and Manner information cannot be conveyed in fictive motion.Secondly,the Figures can be classified into three types in both English and Chines fictive motion.Similarities are also indicate on the distributive patterns.The differences are lied in the way in which Path and Manner information is conveyed in fictive motion.Firstly,complex or consecutive Path expressed by a single motion verb with a series of particles or prepositions containing Ground information is quite normal in English fictive motion.Secondly,compared with Chinese fictive motion event,Manner information shows a higher frequency and in a wider range in English fictive motion event.This thesis adopts some theories related to cognitive linguistics to explain the similarities and differences between Chinese and English fictive motion in order to have a more deeply comprehension of fictive motion.Fictive motion comes from the subjective nature of human mind,thus the pervasive existence of it is not surprising.The conceptual blending theory and Gestalt principle can be used to explain the similarities between Chinese and English fictive motion.What's more,this thesis employs the theory of grammaticalization to explain the differences between Chinese and English fictive motion.We aim to find out features and rules of fictive motion from English-Chinese angle,which can not only deepen our previous understanding between thinking and language phenomenon,but also help to facilitate language learners to have a better understanding of the universality and individuality between different languages.