Comparison Of English And Chinese Spatial Antonyms From The Cognitive Perspective

With the development of cognitive semantics,metaphorical study of spatial words has been very popular among scholars these days.In such a background,the cognitive study of spatial words In,Out,Nei and Wai stands out.However,many scholars just focus on the spatial and metaphorical use of individual spatial words like in,out,up and down and so on.They seldom paid attention to the semantic analysis of spatial antonyms.Considering the gap,the author decides to explore the metaphorical meaning of spatial antonyms In/out and Nei/wai based on relevant cognitive theories.It's assumed in the paper that the symmetry of In/Out and Nei/Wai is internally related to the domains that the corresponding antonyms In/out and Nei/wai can express.Therefore,the paper will firstly explore the symmetry of the two pairs of spatial words In/Out and Nei/Wai and then focus on the domains of the spatial antonyms In/out and Nei/wain order to investigate how the symmetry of In/Out or Nei/Wai affects the domains of the corresponding spatial antonyms.The research adopts the dictionary and corpus-combined method.Firstly,the author had a rough idea of the symmetry of In/Out and Nei/Wai based on their domains presented in the dictionary.Second,by collecting data in the corpus,the author can determine whether the preliminary judgment of the symmetry of In/Out or Nei/Wai is true.In details,the author will randomly collect 1000 samples of sentences with In or Out in COCA and select the first 1000 samples of Nei and Wai respectively in CCL.From these samples,the author will sort out key words modified by these spatial words and further explore the symmetry of those formally symmetrical spatial by corpus searching(opposite spatial word+ key word).Then the semantic symmetry of these words will be explained from the image schema,trajector-landmark theory and linguistic markedness theory.Lastly,the domains of spatial antonyms will be studied by the same dictionary and corpus combined approach.In this way,the link between the domains of spatial antonyms and the symmetry of their components can be explored.After careful analysis of the materials and data collected,it's found that the domains that spatial antonyms In/out or Nei/wai can express have much to do with the symmetry of In/Out or Nei/Wai.If In/Out or Nei/Wai is symmetrical to each other in a certain domain,the corresponding spatial antonym In/out or Nei/wai can mostly express the same domain.Also,there exist some differences between the semantic feature of In/out and Nei/wai.The former can denote both the concept of wholeness and the change from one state or scope to another while the other can only refer to the concept of wholeness.Therefore,In/out conveys richer metaphorical meaning than Nei/wai.What's more,the symmetry of In/Out or Nei/Wai entails the following findings.Firstly,Chinese and Western people share similarities in their cognitive mode.They conceptualized the abstract domain of state as a Container.Also,the fact that spatial antonyms In/out or Nei/wai can express domains where In/Out or Nei/Wai are asymmetrical to each other reveals that both Chinese and Westerners prefer symmetry dependent on the context.Also,in both English and Chinese,the less abstract the metaphorical domain,the higher the degree of symmetry on the part of In/Out or Nei/Wai.However,there are also some differences in the application of Container Schema.It turns out that the spatial word Out is frequently mapped to the dynamic metaphorical meaning while Nei and Wai are always extended to refer to static metaphorical meaning.In addition,the Container Schema is more widely extended in English.That is,westerners have stronger thinking mode of Container.