Abstract
Cognitive linguistics is gradually a pervasive method to survey our daily language which is perceived and realized on the basis of our experience of the world. Many cognitive linguists assert that our shared experience of the world is stored in our everyday language and can be gleaned from the way we express our ideas. So, it is practical and empirical to decode language through our wide and varied experiences. For example, the metaphor TIME IS MONEY can be realized since “money” is a general model for “preciousness” and people take “time” as “money” to represent that it is as precious as money. Academically, the metaphor can be illustrated with the mapping procedure of the so-called ‘target’ category TIME via the ‘source’ category MONEY. In other words, from a cognitive perspective a metaphor is a mapping of the structure of a source model (domain) onto a target model (domain).Among the various linguistic structures for cognitive mapping, Gilles Fauconnier’s work on Mental Space gives a general model for studying the rich interplay between cognitive constructions and natural language. Fauconnier set up mental space structure with space builders, source domain (space) and target domain (space). Space-builders generally come with linguistic clauses, which typically predict relations between elements in source and target spaces. In the classic sentence “in the picture, the girl with blue eyes has green eyes”, the prepositional phrase “in the picture” is a space builder because it connects the two images of the girl separately in the picture (“green eyes”, the target domain) and in speaker’s reality (“blue eyes”, the source domain). That is why we can understand the sentence and cognitively take it reasonable. In this study, we utilized Mental Space structure to survey the relative data in daily use of Mandarin Chinese and analyze the abstract linkage between the source and the target with concrete illustration based on mental space configuration. These interesting language data were mainly dug from Chinese fictions, idiom dictionaries, language corpus, etc. and classified as Mapping by Pragmatic Function, Mapping of Role and its Values and Mapping by Metaphor. We would illustrate these specific language expressions and prove that the assumption and configuration of Mental Space provided by Fauconnier and other linguists can be attested in Mandarin Chinese.