A Comparative Study Of Fictive Motion Classification Between English And Chinese

Fictive motion explains physical motion in real world by using changes or motion or direction in the mental field. Research in this field begins with Talmy in the late 20 th century,he gives a relatively detailed description and explanation of this phenomenon under his theoretical framework in the year 2000 and referred to it as “fictive motion”. Meanwhile many other linguists also put forward their own understanding about this special linguistic phenomenon. In recent years, there are many studies on fictive motion, most of which adopt Talmy's classification. However, we cannot find a paper focusing on whether Talmy's classification applies for Chinese or that contains a thorough research of fictive motion.Basing on Talmy's theories of fictive motion, this thesis makes a contrastive study between English and Chinese by using linguistic data collected from the corpus. Firstly, the intrinsic features of fictive motion are proposed by the author as the standard to distinguish fictive motion expressions in this paper. Next, after a simple introduction of Talmy's classification of fictive motion, examples from both English and Chinese are compared in hope of finding similarities and differences between the two languages. Meanwhile, domestic studies on each sub-type of fictive motion are tentatively evaluated. The comparison results between the two languages are presented in the end.The study shows that due to the difference in language representation, the classification defined by Talmy does not fit into Chinese wholly, and pattern paths and access paths are not common in Chinese. In addition, when studying coextension paths, it has been discovered that the famous path condition and manner condition proposed by Matsumoto show difference in Chinese in that the former works well for Chinese but manner condition is not applicable to Chinese. Basing on this, the paper proposed that the path condition is an explicit requirement whereas the manner condition is only an implicit condition. Lastly, the concept of “double fictiveness” which is the result of interaction of metaphor and fictive motion is proposed.Sentences belong to this type involves two fictive factors.The significance of this thesis lies in the following three aspects: 1) The author's own understanding of the nature of fictive motion is proposed to solve the problem of distinguishing fictive motion expressions. 2) English examples are set as the standard to select Chinese data in order to testify whether Talmy's classification is applicable to Chinese. 3) A comprehensive comparative study between English and Chinese is conducted to fulfill the blank in this research field.