Chinese And Serbian Language Preposition Semantic Contrast

Until now, there has not been carried out any kind of comparative research between Serbian and English.This paper is semantic analysis and comparative study of Chinese and Serbian prepositions, as well as their semantic functions (or roles) in sentence. The aim is to compare and analyze the semantic functions of Chinese prepositions and Serbian "preposition-case constructions". From the semantic point of view prepositions "mark" semantic roles or functions in sentence. This "semantic role or function" of prepositions is determined, or defined by "case grammar" theory.In traditional grammar, "case" refers to morphological changes of words. According to traditional grammar, Serbian language is highly explicit and inflectional language, while Chinese is implicit language. But, from semantic point of view, both systems of semantic cases are compatible.C.J. Fillmore's "case grammar" theory analyzes semantic function of nouns and nominal words. According to this theory, because words have different semantic functions, their cases will also be different. Case determines semantic, relation among semantic constituents in a sentence., hence it is called "semantic role", or "semantic constituent" C.J. Fillmore's in his "case grammar" theory suggests all the languages have "semantic eases". Same "semantic cases" use different forms of expression. For example, Chinese language is implicit language , Chinese words do not change in morphological sense of a word, so in Chinese language "semantic case" is being expressed through word order and functional words, such as prepositions. In some other languages, for example Serbian, "semantic case" is being expressed through morphological changes of words-or traditional cases, meaning that even though words may have morphological changes, their semantic roles are same.Chinese prepositions and Serbian preposition-case constructions can express the same "semantic case" or "semantic role". This theory is foundation of our comparative analysis. Chinese prepositions and Serbian preposition-case constructions; when it comes to semantic functions they have many similarities, but some differences as well.The major difference between Serbian and Chinese prepositions lies in the form in which semantic constituents can appear. Serbian prepositions appear as part of preposition-case construction, but because of its structure, the way we express certain semantic constituents can be different in Chinese and English.This comparative study analyzes similarities and differences of prepositional semantic roles in Chinese and Serbian, as well as comparison of "concepts" that semantic constituents have. Through this kind of comparison, some of the Chinese and Serbian semantic constituents are same (or similar), when it comes to concepts and meanings that they have, for example, prepositions when marking location, or "scope, range", but some of the semantic constituents and semantic roles of prepositions are different in two languages, like prepositional semantic role of "use" is difficult to define in Chinese language.On the other hand, Chinese semantic role of "aspect" is difficult to define in Serbian language, because of the conceptual differences of prepositional semantic roles in these two languages. Some of the prepositions can even have the same meaning and different semantic roles, like some of the prepositions in Chinese language express instrument, but in Serbian language they can have semantic role of "separation from the source". This paper is comparative analysis of prepositional systems in both of the languages, and their common as well as different characteristics.The corpus of this research is gathered from texts, books and articles in Chinese and Serbian, some of them are from the only Chinese-Serbian dictionary.