A Study On The Conceptual Transfer Of Chinese Prepositions "In,Towards,For" By Native English Speakers

Language is not only a tool for the reproduction of human thinking,but also shapes and influences the way people think and plan to guide the mental activities of individuals.Conceptual transfer is studied with bilinguals or multilingual,not only studying the influence of language on thinking,but also focusing on the interactive influence of thinking and language.Chinese does not depend on morphological changes in strict meaning and is a language that is heavily ideographic.Prepositions,as one of the important grammatical tools of Chinese ideograms,have always been a key point in the process of teaching Chinese as a foreign language,and also a difficult point for international students to master.This paper selects three high-frequency prepositions "in","towards" and "for" in Chinese as the objects of this study,and based on the data of HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus Version 2.0,the three prepositions are used in a variety of ways.The study compares the conceptual categories of Chinese prepositions with their English counterparts,analyzes the reasons for the misunderstanding of Chinese prepositions among international students,and proposes corresponding teaching suggestions.The structure of the thesis is divided into six parts as follows.Chapter 1 is the introduction.This chapter mainly introduces the theoretical background of this paper,the current research status and the significance of the analyzed research.Based on the current situation of conceptual migration theory research at home and abroad,the research content and purpose of this paper are proposed in conjunction with the current situation of Chinese preposition ontology research and foreign Chinese preposition teaching research.This paper combines conceptual migration with the study of teaching Chinese prepositions to foreigners by means of corpus analysis,statistical analysis,comparative analysis,and meaning-item diagramming,in the hope of providing positive references for teaching Chinese prepositions to foreigners.Chapter 2 analyzes the conceptual transfer of the preposition "in".Firstly,we define the conceptual scope of the preposition "in" and the corresponding English preposition "in",compare and analyze the similarities and differences between the two conceptual categories,and then propose the prediction of the conceptual transfer of the preposition "in" to learners.On the basis of this,we propose to predict the conceptual migration of the preposition "in".Then,we verify whether the prediction is accurate from two perspectives: positive conceptual migration and negative conceptual migration.The negative conceptual transfer is examined from two levels: word collocation(lexical level)and class association(grammatical level).Chapters 3 and 4 analyze the conceptual transfer of the prepositions "towards" and "for" respectively,with the same structure as Chapter 2.Chapter 5 summarizes the reasons for the conceptual transfer of prepositions "in","towards" and "for" on the basis of the previous study,and proposes suggestions for teaching Chinese prepositions to foreigners and writing teaching materials.Chapter 6 summarizes the main conclusions,points out the shortcomings of this study,and presents the research outlook.