A Cognitive Contrastive Study Of Radiation Fictive Motion Events In English And Chinese

“Fictive Motion(FM)” refers to a subjective and imaginary displacement that describes static scenes through dynamic words or phrases.Several attempts have been made to closely analyze radiation fictive motion events(RFMEs)in English,while such expositions are unsatisfactory in Chinese.Few studies have systematically compared English and Chinese RFMEs.Drawing on Talmy’s motion event frame and theory of FM,this thesis selects the radiation fictive motion expressions from COCA and CCL to analyze the mapping relationship between the semantic components(Motion,Path,and Ground)and the surface structures in English and Chinese.Then this thesis compares the similarities and differences of English and Chinese RFMEs from the perspectives of Manner information,Path information,Ground information,and Typological Features.By analyzing semantic features of the RFMEs in English and Chinese,the results show that:(1)In terms of Manner information,Chinese and English RFM expressions are prone to encode Manner information in verb roots,but Manner verbs in English are more fine-grained than in Chinese.Generally,both English and Chinese are high-manner-salient languages.(2)English usually encodes Path semantic in prepositions,while in Chinese,Path semantic is encoded in directional verbs.In terms of the attachabilty of Path verbs,English uses a compact structure to encode complex Paths.In contrast,complex Paths in Chinese are represented loosely by several separate Motion verbs,which shows the feature of Verb-framed language.(3)Regarding the Ground information,the final Ground information tends to be privileged in English and Chinese.And both English and Chinese are prone to express only one Ground information in a single clause.(4)As for the Typological Features,both English and Chinese show salient Satellite-framed language features.Chinese exhibits patterns that were not merely the same as those of either Satellite-framed languages or Verb-framed languages but shows complementary patterns with a general tendency of S-language > E-language > V-language feature.Finally,the research employs the theories of the windowing of attention and motion metaphor to interpret the cognitive motivations behind RFMEs.From the perspective of theoretical construction,the findings reported here shed new light on the commonalities and individualities between English and Chinese RFMEs.It also provides a theoretical basis for the typological classification of modern Chinese.From a practical point of view,this thesis can make language learners better absorb the features of English and Chinese RFM expressions,and providing a new perspective for developing RFM expressions translation in English and Chinese.