Spatial Frames Of Reference And Their Cognitive Roles In English And Chinese

Cognitive linguists argue that the spatial frame of reference is not only a tool for cognition and thinking, but also is represented by a language phenomenon—locative expressions. To cognize the location of a target object, with their reference-point ability, people tend to choose a certain object as the reference-point and set up a spatial frame of reference. Then they have it as a base, and go along the cognitive route within the cognitive dominion directed by the previously chosen reference-point, until they accomplish their cognition of the target object. In the course of people's cognition, differences in the selection of reference-points in cognizing the same object may lead to differences in people's cognitive structures, hence ambiguity in location indication in this course. This reveals the vital importance of reference-points in human beings' cognitive course. This present study advocates that language universals can be studied from the perspective of spatial cognition by comparing spatial frames of reference and locative expressions in the English and Chinese language. By comparison of English with Chinese in terms of spatial frames of reference and locative expressions, it is found that native English speaker and native Chinese speaker use similar spatial frame of reference when they cognize the location of an object, which actually show universality in their spatial...