Encoding Objects’ Spatial Locations In English And Chinese Towards A Contrastive Study

APervasive in the world around us, the concept of topological relations does not sound unfamiliar. Yet the topological relations encoded in language receive much less attention than expected. Even rarer comparisons and contrasts have been made of the topological encodings in English and Chinese. Besides, the prior studies manifest a shortage of exploring the underlying reasons for different topological encodings across languages. All this entails a cross-linguistically contrastive study like the current one from a cognitive perspective to gain a better understanding of the language of space.Within the framework of the Spatial Schematic System derived from Talmy’s work(2003, 2007), this thesis probes into the topological relations encoded in English and Chinese discourse by analyzing the data in the self-built English and Chinese corpora. The data analysis was carried out by means of the revised CFA method. With the data, we identified three categories of topological relation including proximity, contact and inclusion. To look at how English and Chinese encode these categories of topological relation, we posed two general research questions as follows.(1) What are the similarities and differences in spatial topological encoding between English and Chinese?(2) What are the semantic(and cultural) and cognitive factors that lead to the likenesses and differences?To address the questions, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis of all the collected data. The results and findings are summarized in order as below,with the statements mixed as answers to the research questions.The similarities appear in two aspects. One is that both English and Chinese use closed-class adpositions(prepositions/postpositions) to encode the spatial topological relations(proximity, contact and inclusion). The other is that English and Chinese both have two ways of arranging the objects: the Figure preceding the Ground and the Ground preceding the Figure. As argued, such likenesses are usually extracted on an abstract level, and can be attributed to universal cognitive/semantic factors which would mirror(universal) human cognition in space.The principal dissimilarities are identified in three aspects, along with their semantic/ cognitive motivations. First, prepositions in English but postpositions orcircumpositions in Chinese are employed to localize the Figure. This is due to certain semantic constraints: English prepositions themselves can signal locational information; but Chinese prepositions cannot do so, such that its postpositions are supposed to come into use to couch locative meaning. Further, there might be cultural factors in effecting the different uses of English and Chinese adpositions. Second,within the sentential unit, the Figure frequently precedes the Ground in English,whereas in Chinese the Ground nearly always precedes the Figure. This difference results from their speakers’ different doing reference-point analysis and profiling the entities. Third, within the phrasal unit, the Figure always precedes the Ground in English; by contrast, in Chinese the Ground always precedes the Figure. Such an antithesis is probably due to the fact that in coding Figure/Ground relations, the English speaker always follows the of-prepositional phrase pattern in profiling the Figure, thus coding a “part-whole” relation, but the Chinese speaker always follows the pattern with the possessive morpheme(-’s), or something like that in Chinese anyway in conceptualizing a whole/part relation between objects involved, in profiling the Ground, thus coding a “whole-part” relation. Alternatively, this fact is perhaps because English speakers observe the “functional-salience highlighting”principle and focus on the Figure, making it more salient, while Chinese speakers observe the “physical-magnitude highlighting” principle and focus on the Ground,making it more(physically) prominent.This study can provide some implications, both theoretical and practical.Theoretically, as English-Chinese contrastive research, it can enrich the existing literature on cross-linguistic studies of spatial language. Also, the results about the underlying cognitive process of spatial conception offers insights into how people in different cultures structure the space, therefore contributing to cognitive studies. In practical terms, the cross-linguistic comparison enables us to be aware of how English and Chinese differ in space representations, which is of particular help to the learning of usages of English and Chinese adpositions. In addition, a mastery of the(dis)similarities thus found can be conducive to teaching and doing EnglishChinese/Chinese-English translation.