A Contrastive Semantic Analysis Of Spatial Relation Constructions Of Location In English And Chinese

Space is used to describe the shape of an object.In the process of understanding space,people divide space into upper,middle,and lower spaces.The upper and lower parts usually cover the middle space.From the perspective of cognitive grammar and construction grammar,spatial relation construction refers to a language expression that people use to express the spatial relationship between things.Spatial relation construction of location is an important branch of spatial relationship construction.In English,up and down,above and below,over and under,on and beneath are typical spatial location words.In Chinese,people express the concept of spatial relationship usually using the combination of spatial location words,such as SAHNG,XIA,ZUO,YOU,LI and WAI.Among them,the SAHNG and XIA are the most essential location words that express the spatial concept.However,in contrast to many researches as to the English and Chinese spatial location SHANG from the perspective of construction grammar,there are fewer researches related to the locative word XIA.In order to have a better understanding of the spatial location words in English and Chinese,it is of importance to have a detailed study of XIA,the other one of the two essential location words.The present study aims at a thorough exploration of XIA in Chinese as well as in English.To be more specific,three typical English spatial locative words are chosen,namely,under,below and beneath,as well as XIA,one of the twelve Chinese locative words,as the objects of the present cross-linguistic study.The English language materials studied are collected from the COCA corpus and Collins High-level English-Chinese Bilingual Dictionary.The Chinese ones mainly come from the Modern Chinese Corpus of Peking University(CCL)and Ci Hai.Centering mainly on the conceptual structure of human space,the present study has made thorough analyses of the basic grammatical structure of English and Chinese,in which the concept of spatial conceptual metaphor thinking is adopted to explore the causes and developmental path of the basic grammatical structure in English and Chinese languages.Based on the constructed meaning construction model of the spatial relation construction of location,the thesis has made a thorough and contrastive analysis of English and Chinese spatial relation constructions of location related to XIA,and the major findings are that:Firstly,based on the analysis of the meaning of the English spatial words under,below,beneath,and Chinese spatial words XIA through meaning construction model of spatial relation construction,it is concluded that the extension of semantics is not arbitrary,but there is some relationship between them.The differences and similarities of people's cognition of space under different cultural backgrounds reveal that the development of language is restricted by such factors as social constraints,cultural constraints,and individual psychological development constraints.Secondly,as to the representation of the conceptual structure of locative words in English and Chinese,the English locative words under,below,and beneath are fully lexicalized,while the Chinese appears as ZHI/YI+XIA and XIA+MIAN/BIAN/TOU/FANG that is the form of two-letter language.The English representation is more statute-oriented,the description of the conceptual structure is more detailed,and the integration of the English discourse from bottom to top reflects not only the conceptual integration process but also the formal conventionalization.Because of the fact that English language features in a linear time sequence,English words are characterized by their elastic extensions,while Chinese characters have spatial characteristics in a specific box,and to a greater extent,Chinese language develops in a symbolic direction,featuring both in iconicity and in convention.Thirdly,the English construction is explicit,with obvious formal marks while Chinese construction is hidden,without obvious marks.In terms of language construction,the conceptual structure and metaphorical thinking in English are more logical,while the conceptual structure and metaphorical thinking in Chinese are more symbolic.