| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 華語文教學研究所 === 96 === There are three frames of reference to be used when we use the directional terms to specify the spatial relationships between the entities. They are intrinsic, relative, and extrinsic frame of references. The main topic of this thesis is to study the usage "Noun + cian (front)" in Mandarin Chinese. According to the corpus in Sinica Corpus and Internet database, we categorize different examples in contemporary Chinese language and illustrate various categories as image schema based on the theory of frame of reference. Each frame of reference is subdivided into three spatial relationships: inclusion, contact, and isolation. In the case of intrinsic frame of reference, there are just three types because we simply consider the relationship between reference and located objects. In the case of relative frame of reference, we must also add observer in our discussion. Actually, there are two main strategies for relative frame, i.e., facing and aligning strategy. In the case of extrinsic frame of reference, reference object itself doesn’t have apparent asymmetric structure and it requires another reference object to determine the direction of front.
Though there exists differences between concrete spatial concept and abstract time, we could understand the usage of "cian (front)" through the examples of spatial domain. Also, we discover three evolution paths among them are two static and one dynamic, i.e., static concrete spatial order to static abstract linear order, static linear spatial order to static time sequential order, and dynamic concrete space to dynamic time metaphor of Ego-RP. Besides, we also discuss about the usage of front in English. It is found that English uses preposition or prepositional phrases to specify a spatial relationship which is much more precise than the directional term in Chinese. Those terms include before, in front of in concrete spatial concept. For the case of linear spatial order, the words such as “before”, “previous” are often used. In time metaphor, we think the biggest difference between Chinese and English is that Chinese has Time-RP with ego and English hasn't.
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