The Expression Of Spatial Relationships In English And Chinese: A Cognitive Perspective

Spatial location is the spatial relationship between two or more objects in a certain space,which is the core of all conceptualization and,consequently,of the same status to cognitive semantics that seeks to explore “the fundamental,spatial basis of conceptualization in and through language”.Available research emphasizes the impact of language-specific determinants of acquisition in relation to the anthropological properties of verb-framed language and satellite-framed language.This proves that different languages encourage speakers to rely on different linguistic means and to focus on different types of information,leading to different ways of spatial expressions.This study compares the production of Chinese(N=32)and English speakers(N=32)in an oral description task requiring them to describe what they see from a set of 28 pictures.Each picture shows a relationship of support/contact or containment between two entities.Careful analysis shows that language specificity and the prototypicality of static location scenes are significant in Chinese and English speakers’ spatial expressions.Two fundamental spatial relationships encoding “ON” and “IN” are achieved by using mainly spatial prepositions in English;however,a combination of verbs and prepositional phrases in Chinese are more frequently employed to demonstrate these two spatial relationships.The majority of Chinese speakers rely on “+V+S” pattern,whereas English speakers are inclined to employ “–V+S” pattern to express different static locations.The result turns out that both language specificity and the prototypicality of static location scenes play important part in spatial expressions.This is consistent with the perspective proposed by Slobin,who believed that Chinese differs greatly from English in expressing motion events.Therefore,it is much more reasonable to categorize Chinese as an equipollently framed language other than satellite-framed.