| In world’s languages,expressions such as “the valley zigzags on the slope” are very common.Such expressions are treated as the rhetoric of personification in traditional language studies.However,many scholars began to elaborate on this phenomenon from the perspective of cognitive linguistics ever since the 1970s’ and named it as “fictive motion”.Current studies mainly focus on the cognitive motivations or its semantic elements,which belong to theoretical research.Hence,studies of other types need to be complemented.Talmy(2000)believes that the most universal type of fictive motion is co-extension path fictive motion and it can be perceived as the prototype.This study plans to use a comparative approach,taking Chinese and English fictive motion expressions as the research target,to study the similarities and differences between them.To be specific,three research questions are to be answered:(1)How are figures of Chinese and English co-extension path fictive motion expressions classified and distributed and what are the restrictions for their constructions?(2)How is path information represented in Chinese and English co-extension path fictive motion expressions?(3)How is manner information represented in Chinese and English co-extension path fictive motion expressions?According to the motion event frame theory developed by Talmy(2000),a motion event is comprised of four main elements and some other co-events.Research shows that fictive motion event also possesses these characteristics and therefore it can be perceived as a special form of motion event.The elements of fictive motion event show different features in different languages.Hence,this research uses linguistic theories such as theories of lexicalization pattern,prototype theory to make comparative analyses on two of the main elements and one co-event of a fictive motion event.On the basis of previous studies,the author selects 10 commonly used motion verbs in fictive motion expressions in Chinese and English and then uses them as searching conditions in COCA and CCL corpus.100 sample sentences from the two languages are collected.All these sample sentences are divided into smaller elements according to motion event frame theory for further analyses.With regard to the distribution and restrictions of figures,results show that in most cases,figures are coded by nouns,and in rare situations,they can also be coded by pronouns.Figures of co-extension path fictive motion can be divided into two major categories,based on whether the figures have metonymic relationship with[+MOTION]ICM or not.Furthermore,figures can be again classified into horizontally-extending figures;vertically-extending figures and abstract figures,among which the horizontally-extended figure has metonymic relationship with[+MOTION] ICM is the most frequently used type in both languages,and hence it can be regarded as the prototype of the category of [figure of fictive motion].The figures of both languages have the semantic features of [+IMMOVABILITY],[+RECTANGLE],[+CONTINUITY].Second,in terms of the representation of the path information,results indicate that path information must be represented in both English and Chinese co-extension path fictive motion expressions,and it is realized by using path verbs or path verbs plus satellites.However,the satellite elements in Chinese are more complex than those in English.In addition,when representing path information,English fictive motion expressions have a higher level of specificity for they tend to use more clauses and grounds to further describe the path information.Third,on the representation of manner information,it cannot be directly represented unless it contains path information at the same time and manner information is represented by adverbs.The differences lie in the position and form of the adverbs.At the same time,through observing the collected data,we can find that there are many other co-events in co-extension path fictive motion in both languages.This study explains a language phenomenon that people are familiar with from a cognitive linguistics perspective,which provides cross-linguistic comparative research from a new angle.It also has referential value to language teaching and translation studies. |
