Highlights

Abstract

Keywords

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ The meaning of spatiality and temporality

۳٫ The origin of spatiality and temporality

۴٫ Sentential representation of spatiality in Chinese and temporality in English

۵٫ Textual representation of spatiality in Chinese and temporality in English

۶٫ Conclusion

References anonymously quoted in the manuscript

Conflicts of interest

Acknowledgements

References

Abstract

A language represents the unique medium of how people of a nation perceive and understand the world. This study takes a diachronic perspective to trace the evolution of Chinese and English, respectively, and examines the synchronic features of the two languages that most typically demonstrate the underlying principles of linguistic encoding. It attempts to argue that in dissecting the world and in ways of thinking, Chinese seems to focus more on space and English more on time. Therefore, this study proposes that Chinese is a spatiality-dominant language, whereas English a temporality-dominant one. This fundamental difference underlies many particularities in Chinese and English in terms of their syntactic and textual structures. It is proposed that spatiality and temporality be used as overarching typological parameters to account for the enormous differences between Chinese and English. The findings of this study can provide significant insights into the nature of the distinction between the two languages.

۱٫ Introduction

As a mirror of cultural thoughts, language reflects the particular way the world is observed, understood, and presented (Humboldt, 1999: 81–87). There is extensive literature on the differences between Chinese and English, which are typical of the Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European language family respectively (e.g. Gu, 2005; Link, 2013). In addition, contrastive linguistic perspectives on structural particularities show that Chinese is analytical and English synthetic (Huang, 2010; Lian, 1993), or Chinese is paratactic and English hypotactic (Lian, 1993; Nida, 1982; Wang, 1954). According to the parataxis/hypotaxis account, clauses in Chinese are placed one after another without any connectives to specify their relationships, whereas in English, connectives are typically used to spell out the relationships between different clauses (Tse, 2010). The analytical/synthetic account argues that Chinese uses very few bound morphemes, with most of its words being either free morphemes or compounds of free morphemes. However, as a synthetic language, English has a large number of bound morphemes, which are often combined to form a word (Barber et al., 2009).