A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Motion Events Construal: A Conceptual Transfer Perspective

Motion is one of the earliest and most basic experiences of human beings.Different language speakers show great linguistic differences when describing the movements around them(Papafragou et al 2008).Based on where Path information is encoded,Talmy(2000b)divides the world' languages into S-language and V-language.While Slobin(2004)adds the third language typology: E-language.Based on the typology theory of motion events by Talmy and Slobin,this study attempts to examine the similarities and differences between English and Chinese in the Figure,Path and Ground information from the perspectives of concept transfer and conceptualization transfer.It aims at revealing the conceptual and cognitive differences behind the Chinese English learners' understanding of the linguistic phenomenon of motion events.In this study,there are a total of 100 effective participants who major in Chinese Language and Literature in a university of Hebei Province.The elicitation material is 31 short video clips from the silent and non-subtitled animated video Bambi.The results are reported separately as follows:Firstly,in the descriptions of Figure information,it does not show any significant differences between Chinese and English.However,there exist some errors reflected in the article use such as article omission and article confusion.It reveals that concept transfer and conceptualization transfer occurs in the descriptions of English Figure information.Secondly,in the descriptions of Path information,it shows significant differences between Chinese and English in Path verbs and the English path verbs are used less frequently than Chinese.Besides,the frequency of the English Path satellites is overly high.It reveals that conceptualization transfer occurs in the descriptions of English Path information.Thirdly,in the descriptions of Ground information,English learners pay more attention to Source and Goal information,less focus on Medium information both Chinese and English.Besides,there is a statistically significant difference only in the expression of Source information.It reveals that conceptualization transfer occurs in the descriptions of English Ground information.The combination of conceptual transfer with motion events has relatively important theoretical significance.A comparative study of Chinese and English motion events can contribute to the study of motion domains in conceptual transfer.And conceptual transfer can promote people to construe motion events from the perspective of cognition and concept.Itcan be said that they complement each other.In addition,this study attempts to construe the motion events from the aspects of concept transfer and conceptualization transfer,which not only can fully understand the conceptual transfer,but also can identify the level of language specificity.