A Contrastive Study Of Spatial Category In English And Chinese

After the publication of Metaphors We Live by(Lakoff & Johnson,1980),spatial category has been a heated topic in linguistics.The polysemy of lexical form,especially those forms which are used in spatial category,has attracted profound attention from linguists at home and abroad.According to cognitive linguists,as the main source of constructing other abstract categories,spatial category plays an essential role in expressing many abstract domains,such as time and state domains.Cognitive linguistics succeeds in explaining the polysemy of spatial expressions,which does help to seek universals of all languages.However,the differences on spatial category among languages are not well explained,since it only seeks explanation from culture and other social factors,while ignores the inner cause.Different from cognitive linguistics,Linguistic Inventory Typology is a branch of linguistic typology and a new perspective of linguistics which is proposed by Liu Danqing in 2011.Not only focusing on semantic meaning,but also concentrating on grammatical form,Linguistic Inventory Typology is,thus,a suitable theory to study spatial category from the inner side of languages.Some semantic categories are mighty and have the feature of expansion to other categories in some languages.In other words,languages vary in the construction of spatial information they encode.Almost every language selects some information components which direct speaker's attention,as a result,leaving other components implicit and to be inferred.Similarly,when expressing spatial category,languages always make choices about which elements they assume to be most salient for the description of situations.Spatial category was previously divided into location and displacement by many linguists.However,this thesis believes that entity belongs to spatial category,since it must occupy some area in space.Based on Linguistics Inventory Typology,this study analyzes spatial categories synchronically in both Chinese and English,including entity category,location category and displacement category.And we summarize some similarities and difference of spatial categories on linguistic inventory:(1)entity must occupy a certain area of space,and it is always expressed by nouns and pronouns in both English and Chinese.Besides,every entity denotes some kinds of shape feature,and nouns as well as adjectives are often used to express general shape features of entities in both English and Chinese.But there is a special term,shape classifiers,only found in Chinese to express shape category;(2)location category is revealed by prepositions and the combination of ? zai ‘in' and locatives in English and Chinese respectively.(3)Motion verbs are good at revealing the manner of a displacement in both English and Chinese,and prepositional phrases play an important role in marking the departure and the destination in the two languages.However,apart from the similarities,displacement category is revealed by adverbials in English but by directional verbs or directional complement in Chinese.After studying synchronically and diachronically,we conclude different mightiness of spatial categories in English and Chinese:(1)not only shape classifier is a mighty class in Chinese linguistic inventory,shape category is also a mighty semantic category and expands to indicate number and dimension category;(2)location category is a mighty category in both English and Chinese,for the extensive uses of its forms in indicating temporal category.For example,both prepositions in English and the pattern of ? zai ‘in' + locatives in Chinese expand to indicate temporal category;(3)displacement is also a mighty category in Chinese,for directional verbs expand to show aspect category and modality category in Chinese sentences.Therefore,displacement category is a mighty category in Chinese,but not in English.Cognitive linguistics mainly focuses on the extensive uses of spatial expressions to other categories,mainly temporal category,ignoring the importance of entity category and shape category.However,this study aims to show how spatial categories are presented in English and Chinese,including entity category,location category and displacement category,and examine how they changed in a diachronic level to summarize the differences on the grammaticalization and extensive uses of spatial categories.Then this paper tries to account for the differences and expansion from mighty category,since the mighty category has the feature of expansion,which is revealed in synchronic grammar.Only by comparing different languages,can we grasp the nature of each language.Therefore,on the one hand,the contrastive study on spatial categories of English and Chinese hopes to shed light on the nature of the two languages and enrich studies on spatial category.On the other hand,it contributes a new perspective to typological researches.