An Cognitive Linguistics Study On The Expressions Of Spatial Perspective

Perspective is one of mankind’s most common and basic cognitive styles. Space is one of the most basic cognitive domains in cognitive linguistics. So spatial perspectives are important factors affecting language. We primarily explore the relationship between spatial perspective and expressions of Chinese from two dimensions:generalized space perspective and narrow space perspective.First of all, we distinguish the observations of the two-dimensional space environment map or floor plan)ant the three dimensional space environment from as an external or an internal perspective, which collectively refer to generalized space perspective.We discuss whether various space feature and acquisition of the environment would affect the mental issues of reproduction and description of space, with the combination of cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics theories, and the use of psychological experiments and mathematical statistics methods. Experimental 1 analyses the language features of the descriptions of external and internal perspectives.Results show that perspective not only reflect in words, but also in syntactic and discourse levels. By testing whether people have the ability to describe the familiar space scenes from an unfamiliar perspective, Experiment 2 explores the transformation process of perspective in space psychological representations and linguistic outputs. Participants were requested to describes layouts of a familiar building from the internal or external perspectives.Results show that speakers can describe this environment from an unfamiliar perspective. From Experiment 1 and 2, we conclude the perspective transformation model from physical space to psychological space, and from psychological space to linguistic space.Second, referring to the former study of cognitive linguistics, we resolve the narrow perspective in three-dimensional space into location of observation points, observation distance, observation range (attention’s domain), perspective movement, observation mode (synoptic mode or sequential mode), and direction of viewing (order scan or reverse scan). We make specific analyses of the effects to language expressions, discuss the composite categories made of these subcategories, and coclude the cognitive principles.Third, based on concrete linguistic facts of Chinese, we explore the relationship between subjective perspective and expressions of directions in modern Chinese. Using the perspective categories and cognitive principles in Chapter 3, We analyse several questions in the expressions of directions in modern Chinese. Such as the tendencies and freedom of the collocations of nouns and localizers, the special usage of "up" and "down", and the ambiguity of expressions of horizontal dimension in Chinese.