The Contrastive Study of Spatial Constructions na NP_loc in the Russian Language and 在NP上 in the Chinese Language in the Cognitive Aspect

Abstract

Establishment of locations is a very important task in the Named Entity Recognition technology. The given paper describes a contrastive study of the prepositional constructions with a spatial meaning in the Russian and Chinese languages. Basing on the principles of cognitive semantics, a spatial use of the Russian preposition ‘na’ (meaning ‘on’ in English) is investigated in combination with NP in the prepositional case in the Russian language compared with the frame construction ‘在NP上’ (zài NP shàng) in Chinese. For semantic representation of these constructions, the pictures of image schemata are used, i.e. the mental structures that reflect the spatial relationships of ‘trajector’ and ‘landmark’. The analysis of the markers compared in Russian and Chinese shows that although the underlying schemata they reflect are largely the same, there is no full translational equivalence between these markers. This is due not only to the fact that for one of the image schemata expressed by the Chinese construction in the Russian language, the preposition ‘nad’ (‘over’) is used but also by a number of other factors: competition of alternative schemas for the same referent spatial configuration and preference by the Russian language of the variant encoded by another preposition (lampa pod potolkom ‘a lamp under the ceiling’ > lampa pod potolkom ‘a lamp on the ceiling’; dyrka v podoshve ‘a hole in the sole’ > dyrka na podoshve ‘a hole of the sole’), by a stronger influence of the topological type of a landmark object and the nature of the trajector movement on the choice of the preposition in the Russian language.