A Contrastive Study On Path Representations In English And Chinese Factive Translational Motion Events

Factive Translational Motion Events are basic and extensive motion events and the study of Factive Translational Motion Events is of great linguistic value.Based on selfbuilt corpus,this thesis conducts a contrastive analysis of the four components of Path,namely,Vector,Direction,Conformation and Boundedness,in terms of their expression similarities and differences in English and Chinese Factive Translational Motion Events,with a view to enrich the theoretical research of Motion Events.This thesis employs English and Chinese narrative texts as the source of self-built corpus.In total,3361 Factive Translational Motion Events cases are obtained.After analyzing data,we find that both English and Chinese tend to(1)encode single Vector and implicit[Traversal];(2)implicitly express the Verging Direction;(3)express the Inside/Outside conformation most frequently and implicitly express the Above/Beneath conformation;(4)show obvious bounded tendency.English and Chinese demonstrate certain differences in regard to the expression of Path information in Factive Translational Motion Events:(1)English displays more prominence than Chinese in the expression of Vector,while the Combined Vector pattern occurs merely in English;(2)the proportion of English in the Horizontal Direction is lower than that of Chinese,and the proportion in the Vertical Direction is much higher than that of Chinese;(3)in the expression of Vector and Direction,English applies verbs plus prepositions and other additional lexical devices;Chinese employs satellite structure or a single Path verb which can convey Manner information and Path information as well;(4)in light of the expression of Boundedness,Chinese tends to use the structure of[Manner Verb+过].This thesis also discusses the reasons for the above similarities and differences from the perspective of cognitive mechanism and language system.From the attention window,Traversal is backgrounded in both English and Chinese,and the medial window is closed.The Bounded tendency shown in English and Chinese can be explained by the Gestalt closure principle.As for the differences of Path expressions,English exhibits the characteristics as a typical Satellite-framed language,while Chinese demonstrates more characteristics of being an Equipollently-framed language.This will enrich the study of Motion Events and linguistic typology and lay a solid foundation for large-scale typological language investigation.