A Contrastive Study On Paths In English And Chinese Fictive Emanation Motion Events

Fictive Emanation Motion Event(FEME)belongs to Fictive Motion Event and it is arousing more attention in the field of Motion Events(MEs).This thesis is a contrastive study on Paths in English and Chinese FEMEs on the basis of self-built parallel corpus and online corpora.We compare and contrast the expressions of four components of fictive Paths in English and Chinese-Vector,Conformation,Direction and Perspective.We also explore factors and mechanisms behind them,so as to find out the similarities and differences in forms of expression between English and Chinese FEMEs,and provide theoretical and statistical support for the study of FMEs.In this thesis,the data collected are processed by Corpus Word Parser of CNCORPUS.Then Antconc 3.5.8 is used for concordance and word frequency.After processing and manual selection,a total of 1793 FEMEs are obtained,of which 901 cases are Chinese and 892 cases are English.According to results of our contrastive analysis,English and Chinese show similarities in the expression of Direction component.There are both similarities and differences in the expression of Conformation.Besides,these two languages show great differences in expressing the information of Vector and Perspective.Specifically,the similarities and differences in the expression of English and Chinese Path components are as follows:(1)Conformation in both English and Chinese can be divided into "inside" shape,"surface" shape and "outside" shape according to characters of spacial scale.When expressing information of Conformation,both languages tend to use language forms such as "里/into" and "上/onto" to explicitate Conformation of Path,i.e.,relative position between Figure and Ground is explicitly depicted.(2)In the aspect of Direction component,Direction of Path is explicitly expressed in both languages.Besides,horizontal,vertical and verging direction are distributed equably in English and Chinese FEMEs.(3)In the aspect of Vector component,English is more likely to express Vector information,with the percentage of 85.99%,much higher than 48.28%in Chinese.Besides,English prefers to use a combination mode of[Traversal+Arrival],while Chinese is inclined to employ the single pattern of[Departure]and[Arrival].In addition,the Traversal is implicit in Chinese but explicit in English.(4)As for the difference in Conformation expression,English FEMEs have a more elaborated and detailed description of Conformation,because more prepositions than Chinese are used to express different shapes and space dimensions.But the shapes and dimensions have to be inferred from Chinese contexts because some directional complements in Chinese,such as“到”,“在”and“过来”,blur the fictive Paths.(5)In terms of Perspective component,Chinese puts emphasis on Perspective information on account of the extensive use of“来/去”and verb-directional construction.Besides,"去”tends to be applied to encode visual Path and“来”is apt to encode auditory and olfactory Path in Chinese.But in English,few lexical devices such as "bring/take" are used in FEMEs resulting in an implicit expression of Perspective information in English.(6)English and Chinese FEMEs encode Paths differently:Chinese employs a pattern of[Motion1+Path1]+[Motion2+Path2],while English uses a pattern of[Motion1+Path1+Path2].Furthermore,the factors behind the similarities and differences are investigated from three aspects:cognitive mechanisms,active-determinative principle and language systems.Firstly,English and Chinese differ in windows of attention and preferences of patterns of Vector.The traversal Vector in English is foregrounded and medial windowing but backgrounded and medial gapping in Chinese.Secondly,English and Chinese show different perspectival mode.English FEMEs privilege a sequential perspectival mode but the construal of fictive Paths in Chinese can be conducted either in a sequential mode or in a synoptic mode,which explains why Chinese highlights the perspective information of Paths.Thirdly,the grammatical features of two languages result in the difference of Vector expressions.Though both English and Chinese show the features of Satellite-framed language,they use different modes of encoding:Chinese employs verb-directional constructions but English adopts verb-prepositional constructions.Some directional verbs,such as“上”,“进步”,etc.,can be used alone as Path verbs to describe Paths but path satellites in English have to follow a verb.Moreover,Chinese prepositions(“从”,“朝”)usually collocate with noun of locality to express the information of location or direction.But English locative prepositions themselves indicate the information of direction,and its[initial vector]cannot be omitted like that in Chinese.Finally,the active-determinative principle ascertains the source of FEMEs and the agent-distal object pattern provides a basis of FEMEs cognition:the perception of an agent’s motion in the physical world is mapped onto the conceptualization of an emanation.FEMEs take place at the initial locus of the source,which is determined by the more active or determinative entity.The ensuing activity that finally impresses the distal object goes forward through space from that initial locus to the distal object.This thesis conducts a relative comprehensive analysis of Paths in English and Chinese FEMEs.On the whole,English and Chinese are similar in the expression of fictive Paths,which contributes to the typological research of Paths.