Abstract
This article studies the Chinese spatial language units 上shàng ‘up’, 下xià ‘down’, 前qián ‘front’, and 后hòu ‘back’ and compares them with the correspondent English and Russian language units. The study includes three aspects: the tone variability (such as the natural tone) in Chinese from the phonological point; the morphological divisions (monosyllabic-monomorphemic vs. polysyl-labic-polymorphemic forms for instance) of these spatial languages; and the concrete spatial description form the semantic perspective. The major results re-veal that Chinese spatial language units show more flexible compounding with other language units, however, English and Russian incline to emphasize the syntactic forms and prepositional constructions. The research offers some references to contrastive linguistics, translation study, cross-cultural and linguistic research.
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How to cite this paper
A Contrastive Study of Spatial Language Units in Chinese, English and Russian: Tone, Form, and Semantic Details
How to cite this paper: Peng Liu, Shu Wang. (2026). A Contrastive Study of Spatial Language Units in Chinese, English and Russian: Tone, Form, and Semantic Details. Translation and Foreign Language Learning, 2(1), 110-117.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/tfll.2026.01.018