A Contrastive Study Of Grounds In English And Chinese Motion Events

As one of the four internal semantic components of Motion Events(MEs),Ground has received relatively less attention among them.However,it plays an indispensable role in the process of conceptualization on Motion Events.This thesis is a contrastive study on Grounds in English and Chinese Motion Events with the assistance of self-built corpus and online corpora.The aim of study is to find out similarities and dissimilarities between English and Chinese Ground expressions from mainly three aspects:typological differences,syntactic functions and features of Grounds.Finally,the factors behind the similarities and differences are investigated.Major findings are as follows:The study finds that English and Chinese share some similarities in Ground expressions.From the perspective of typology,1)Both languages have the phenomenon of implicitly expressing Grounds,with the percentage of 42.7%in Chinese and 36.4%in English.The default path information in verbs or in combination with verb particles leads to the implicitly embodying of Ground.And some spatial terms are generally covert,such as the earth’s axes;2)Both languages have no significant preference variance in goal-schema constancy.They exhibit great tendency to express the final Grounds,while implicitly denoting the medial components of the moving trajectories;With regard to syntactic analysis,3)Ground information is predominately encoded in NPs and fill the slot of the object in non-caused MEs in both languages and it has several possible roles in realization in caused MEs.Grounds can be encoded in pronouns in both languages;4)There exists some variations in both languages that Figure over Ground precedence order is violated;Concerning features of Grounds,5)Generally,entities with low movability and animacy are inclined to be configured as Grounds.The analysis also reveals that the two languages are divergent from each other in the following aspects:1)Chinese has more minus-ground MEs sentences than English;Plus-ground clauses in English is higher than those in Chinese,with the percentage of 63.6%in English and 57.3%in Chinese.2)Compared with Chinese,English uses more two-ground-element clauses and three-plus-ground clauses,accounting for 8.4%and 1.2%.While Chinese only has 2.6%two-ground-element clauses.English speakers have the higher tendency to attach multiple ground elements to a single verb of motion than Chinese speakers;3)English tends to expresses medial Ground explicitly more often than Chinese,with the percentage of 17.9%in English and 5.9%in Chinese;4)English allows a succession of preps to encode ground information in the pattern of[Motion 1+Ground 1+Ground 2+Ground 3...]while Chinese are restricted to adopt the pattern of[Motion 1+Ground 1]+[Motion 2+Ground 2]+[Motion 3+Ground 3]due to the serial verb construction;5)English has more exclusive types of combined Ground patterns than Chinese,such as[Final+Initial],which exhibits the violation of the chronological order of events;With regard to syntactic analysis,6)The phenomenon that denominal verbs conflating ground information is exclusive in English.Only English can encode Grounds in verbs.Concerning features of Grounds,the frequency of English and Chinese Grounds manifests different movability sequences.The factors behind the similarities and dissimilarities are elaborated mainly from two aspects:cognitive mechanism and language system.In terms of cognitive factors,the windowing of Ground shared by human beings contributes to the similarities in the two languages and the individual perspectival system result in the differences of encoding ground information.In addition,different lexicalization patterns and grammatical characteristics of the two languages exert great influence on the encoding of Grounds.Disparate language systems to which the two languages belong generate differences in expressing ground information.English is typically characterized as static due to the flexibility and prevalent application of prepositions as well as the preference for nominal expressions,whereas Chinese manifests its dynamic features realized by the wide use of verbs,especially the serial verb construction.The two distinctive features result in their different preferences for Ground patterns.The present thesis provides a systematic contrastive analysis of Grounds in English and Chinese Motion Events and will be instructive to the research fields of language typology and motion event translation as well as the practical teaching process in second language acquisition.