Research On South Korean Students’ Usage Of Common Spatial Prepositions In Chinese

Affected by the differences in cognition and language types, South Korean students have some problems in space expression with modern Chinese, especially the use of prepositions, is one of the difficulties of space expression.For example,there will be some wrong sentences like “从银行到车站，一直走”,Which the native speakers will correct to“从银行一直走到车站”As we all know,the modern Chinese lack of significant grammatical markers.The expressions of the grammatical relations rely on the changes in word order and the function words. One of the most important grammatical methods of expressing the spatial relations is using spatial prepositions. Korean is agglutinative language,expressing the spatial relations mainly by auxiliary. In terms of the research object, this paper will focus on the prepositions. On the basis of the static and dynamic space system in modern Chinese, in addition with the predecessors’research about the native speakers’ frequency of using prepositions,I picked four common used spatial prepositions “在”“从”“向”“到” to study.It is a fact that different cognition will affect the expression and the understanding of languages. Spatial cognition is the foundation of other cognition. As a result,there are many differences in the cognition of spatial relations between different nationals, this will be reflected in the use of languages. As neighbours,there are not only similarities but also differences between China and South Korea in the spatial cognition.Therefore, this paper discusses both the differences in spatial relationship expression and cognition of the South Korean students when they acquire the spatial prepositions.The study will have certain significance on helping South Korean students learn spatial prepositions and express spatial relation more accurately.What’s more, it also meaningful to the learning of other categories which are metaphorized from space category.I will study "Research on South Korean students’ usage of common spatial prepositions in Chinese"in this paper.Through the experiment I will investigate the acquisition of the common used space preposition“在”“从”“向”“到”of the South Korean students.And then through the analysis of language contrast and spatial cognition, I will discuss the characteristics of South Korean students’ spatial cognition.In this paper, the research is adopted by experiments and analysis. I will do a experiment and questionnaire to research the theme.The subjects are South Korean exchange students whose Chinese level is primary to intermediate. I will show the students two pictures,one is the picture of a room containing a variety of household items which show different spatial relations.The other one is a picture of a community through which the students can express the displacement.The expression will be recorded to investigate the usage of spatial prepositions. Questionnaire is mainly aimed at different preposition structures in modern Chinese to investigated the students’ acceptable degree of Chinese cognitive habits. The reason that I chose such a relatively free way of recording is to allow the students to express spatial relationships in a real environment as far as possible without interference and constraints. At the same time in order to facilitate comparison, the students will express both in Chinese and Korean. First in Chinese and then in Korean. At the same time, considering the limitations of the expression, some of the common preposition structures will be investigated by the form of questionnaire.The Introduction of this paper stated the reason and significance of the topic.The first chapter summarizes the predecessors’ research on spatial prepositions and cognitive linguistics. The second chapter to the fifth chapter will respectively investigate the acquisition of “在” “从” “向”“到” of South Korean students. The last chapter intends to summarize the strategy of teaching spatial prepositions to South Korean students.Through experiments and analysis we can find that it is not very difficult for South Korean students to master the basic semantic of spatial prepositions, but due to the space preposition is not one-to-one correspondence with the Korean space auxiliary,it’s not very easy for South Korean students aquire the space preposition. This is not just because the negative transfer of mother tongue,under these phenomena, it reflects the spatial cognitive differences in Chinese and Korean, such as categorization,image schema, family resembalance. Chinese is analytic language, these four common used spatial preposition semantic and function is quite clear, so there rarely appears the confusions or misuses of them.But South Korean students have more problems in the different structures of the same preposition. This is because the different structures reflect the different cognition.But in the process of learning or teaching, the students or teachers didn’t notice it very well.From the analysis of this paper we can see that the cognition is a very factor which influence the expression and understanding of the sentences.The cognition sometimes can determine the form of a sentence when the students need to chose from different structures to express what they thought. Cognitive linguistics studies two aspects.One is the cognition which influences the formation of languages,means people how to use the language symbols to conceptualize things. It involves categorization,metapher,image schema and other theories.The other one is the process of cognizing when human beings use and understand the languages.This involves the highlights and choice of semantic structures. When South Korean students express or understand the space relations in Chinese,they ususlly not pay attention to the deep cognitive things, they only focus on the surface of the language, so it’s easy for them to take their own cognition into the language they learning. At the same time,spatial prepositions often contains some complex cognitive laws and rules, and primary to intermediate level South Korean students are relatively deeply affected by mother tongue and the inherent cognition when they express the spatial relationships.There will be some problems when the students express or decode the spatial relationship. In this paper,I try to research on the usage of the common used spatial prepositions and cognitive characteristics,explain the psychological structure and the process of they using the language,by which I try to analysising the process of the dynamic cognition.I hope to help South Korean students acquire the spatial prepositions better.