An English-Chinese Contrastive Study On The Spatial Metaphor Of Down/Xia Expressions

English prepositions and Chinese nouns of locality are polysemous words whose basic function is to convey spatial relations.Their non-spatial meanings can be constructed through spatial metaphors where a mapping from the spatial domain(source domain)to the non-spatial one(target domain)occurs.In this process,their spatial meanings are metaphorically extended to construct their corresponding nonspatial meanings.Due to this shared feature,the two types of words are comparable.The spatial meanings and their metaphorical extensions through spatial metaphor can be analyzed by resorting to the model of image schemata put forward by Langacker.The thesis intends to conduct a thorough contrastive study among the five synonymous down/xia expressions,namely English prepositions down,under,below and beneath and the Chinese noun of locality 下 on their spatial meanings and metaphorical extensions.By adopting both qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze a large number of language materials for these five words selected from British National Corpus(BNC)and Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese(BCMC)with the help of the image schema model proposed by Langacker and cognitive metaphor theories,the thesis intends to figure out the following two questions:(1)What are the spatial meanings of English and Chinese down/xia expressions? What are their similarities and differences?(2)Have these spatial meanings been metaphorically extended? If yes,how do they construct their corresponding non-spatial meanings through metaphorical extensions,and what are the distributions of the target domains onto which they are mapped in their metaphorical extensions?Through a thorough analysis,it has been found that the spatial meanings of English and Chinese down/xia expressions can be divided into static and dynamic ones.Concerning static spatial meanings,the following similarities and differences have been found: all the five expressions can convey a static UP-DOWN spatial relation;under,below,beneath and 下 share a static covering relation;both under,beneath and下 can convey a static contact relation;down and under share a static WITHIN relation,and what is peculiar to down is that it can convey observer-centered spatial proximity.In the aspect of dynamic spatial meanings,it has been found that all the five words can convey a horizontal movement;except for under,the other four words share a dynamic UP-DOWN spatial relation,and what tells down from the other four words is that it can convey a dynamic IN-OUT spatial relation.All these spatial meanings can construct non-spatial meanings through metaphorical extensions.The static UP-DOWN spatial relation conveyed by down,below,beneath and 下 can be metaphorically extended to social status domain through the metaphor HIGH STATUS IS UP,LOW STATUS IS DOWN.Both static and dynamic UP-DOWN spatial relations shared by down and 下,as well as the static UPDOWN spatial relation shared by under and below can be extended to quantity domain through the metaphor MORE IS UP,LESS IS DOWN.The horizontal moving relation shared by down and under,as well as the static UP-DOWN relation conveyed by 下can be extended to time domain through the two sub-metaphors of the moving ego metaphor,namely PAST IS FRONT,FUTURE IS BACK and PAST IS UP,FUTURE IS DOWN respectively.The static UP-DOWN relation conveyed by below and 下 can be extended to sequential relation domain,and the contact relation shared by under and下 can be extended to influence domain through the metaphor HAVING CONTROL OR INFLUENCE IS UP,BEING SUBJECTED TO CONTROL OR INFLUENCE IS DOWN.The cover relation shared by under and beneath can be extended to abstract covering relation domain,and the static and dynamic UP-DOWN relations conveyed by down as well as the dynamic IN-OUT relation conveyed by 下 can be metaphorically extended to state domain.What is peculiar to down is that its static and dynamic UP-DOWN relations can be metaphorically extended to visual sense domain and emotion/attitude domain.Therefore,it can be seen that there are both similarities and differences among these five down/xia expressions in the aspects of their spatial meanings and metaphorical extensions.Such findings will serve to deepen the understanding of the polysemous phenomenon of English prepositions and Chinese nouns of locality,and furthermore throw light on the perception of the similarities and differences between English and Chinese languages.