A cognitive linguistic approach to English, Chinese and Thai spatial terms: the case of on, shangand bon

Abstract

The objective of this article is to compare the English spatial term on, the Chinese spatial term shang and the Thai spatial term bon from the cognitive linguistic perspective. These three spatial terms share a basic meaning of the position on the surface of something. However, the extended usages of these three terms are relatively different. In analyzing the differences between these three terms, sample sentences of English, Chinese, and Thai are collected from three corpora. The corpora used are British National Corpus by Oxford University (2021) for English sentences, Modern Chinse CCL Corpus by Peking University (2021) for Chinese sentences, and Thai National Corpus by Chulalongkorn University (2021) for Thai sentences. Data collected from the corpora are analyzed and discussed. The cognitive linguistic approach is adopted in the discussion. Concepts of spatial relations and meaning, proto-scene, polysemy words, and the semantic network of these three spatial terms are discussed in this article. The result of the analysis can be applied to spatial terms in teaching and learning. Since the difference between languages should be emphasized during classes, some negative transfers may be prevented. In addition, foreign students will have a better understanding of the terms studied in the foreign language classes.