基于语料库的汉英西儿童介词隐喻对比分析

Corpus-Based Comparative Analysis of Preposition Metaphors of Chinese, English and Spanish Children

摘要: 随着各国小学教育以“儿童本位”理念为基础，儿童语言–认知的相关研究的重要性日益凸显。然而，现阶段的相关研究大多站在单一语言视角，研究6岁以下的儿童语言及认知发展，跨语言视角下学龄儿童的相关研究依然有很大的探讨空间。因此，本文以6、8、10岁的汉、英、西语儿童为研究对象，对CHILDES语料库内的儿童语料进行量化研究，以汉、英、西语儿童的介词“在”、“in”、“en”的隐喻义作为研究对象，进一步探讨儿童在空间隐喻上的认知共性和个性。最后，语料库数据表明，汉语儿童在6岁已经出现了介词的空间隐喻且逐年上升；英、西儿童的相关介词隐喻在10岁集中出现，展现相对滞后性。同时，汉语儿童多将“在”投射到时间域，少数用于媒介域；英语儿童多将“in”投射到状态域；西语儿童多将“en”投射到时间、状态、心理、媒介的抽象域中。此类差异多源自于汉、英、西语在语言类型、句法结构等方面的差异，然而，汉、英、西儿童介词空间隐喻的发展路径也展现出了儿童认知的具身性和从具体运算阶段向形式运算阶段的过渡。

Abstract: As primary education across countries is rooted in the child-centered philosophy, the significance of research on children’s linguistic-cognitive development has become increasingly prominent. However, most existing relevant studies adopt a single-language perspective to examine the linguistic and cognitive development of children under six years old, leaving considerable room for further exploration of school-age children from a cross-linguistic viewpoint. Therefore, this paper takes Chinese, English and Spanish children aged 6, 8 and 10 as research subjects, conducts a quantitative analysis of child language data from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) Corpus, and focuses on the metaphorical meanings of the prepositions “在”, “in” and “en” in the three languages to further explore the cognitive commonalities and individualities of children in spatial metaphor. Finally, corpus data shows that Chinese children have already developed spatial metaphors of prepositions at the age of six, with a steady rising tendency as they grow older. In contrast, English and Spanish children demonstrate a concentrated emergence of relevant prepositional metaphors at the age of ten, reflecting a relative developmental lag. Meanwhile, Chinese children mostly project the preposition “在” onto the temporal domain, with only a small proportion extended to the medium domain; English children predominantly project “in” onto the state domain; Spanish children largely project “en” onto abstract domains including time, state, psychology and medium. Such divergences mainly derive from the disparities of Chinese, English and Spanish in linguistic typology, syntactic structure and other aspects. Nevertheless, the developmental paths of prepositional spatial metaphors among children speaking the three languages all embody the embodied nature of children’s cognition, as well as their cognitive transition from the concrete operational stage to the formal operational stage.