关键词: 英汉对比; 拓扑关系; 表达; 认知理据

Abstract: This article contrastively explores the encodings of topological relations in English and Chinese narratives, and their cognitive motivations. With the collected data, we have sorted out three types of topological relation - proximity, contact, and inclusion - and carried out a detailed data analysis. It is found that there are similarities and differences in English and Chinese topological descriptions. The similarities appear in two aspects. Above all, in both Chinese and English, closed-class adpositions are used to express the topological relations and localize the Figure, and then, both sets of data contain “Figure preceding Ground” and “Ground preceding Figure” constructions. As argued, such similarities are generally extracted on an abstract level, and can be attributed to universal human cognition in space. The differences and their motivators emerge in three aspects. First, English prepositions are used, but Chinese postpositions are required, to localize the Figure. This is largely because English prepositions per se can signal locative meaning but the Chinese preposition “zai (在)” cannot, such that the postpositions are required to couch locative meaning. Second, on the sentence level, the Figure mostly precedes the Ground in English, whereas in Chinese the Ground nearly always precedes the Figure. This difference results from their respective speakers’ different doing reference-point analysis for profiling the entities. Third, on phrase level, the Figure always precedes the Ground in English, but the Ground always precedes the Figure in Chinese. It is shown that such a contrast is due to their speakers’ differently doing reference point analysis at the phrasal level.

Keywords: contrastive analysis; topological relation; description; cognitive motivation