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Abstract Abstract: Although some research has been respectively conducted on the syntactic and semantic features of Chinese and English locative subject sentences, little research to date has been done on the contrastive study of these sentences between the two languages. This paper intends to make a contrastive analysis of the locative subject sentences between the Chinese and English languages in terms of their syntax and semantics at the levels of the construction and its component structures from the perspective of cognitive linguistics to probe into the similarities and differences and to reveal their fundamental differences. It is found that 1) both Chinese and English locative subject sentences have the semantic feature of ‘location property’ and both can indicate the meaning of abundance; 2)the semantic tolerance of Chinese locative subject constructions is much greater than that of English; 3) Chinese locative subjects are much more developed than those of English and show autonomy in terms of their abilities in container-schema activation, while those of English demonstrate dependency; 4）the objects of Chinese locative subject sentences enjoy a central position, while their English counterparts are in a peripheral position only demonstrating a means by which the location possesses some property and instead，the verbs enjoy a central position. It is thus concluded that such differences can be attributed to the crucial discrepancy between the spatiality of Chinese and the temporality of English.
Key words: locative subject sentences; a contrastive study of Chinese and English; syntax; semantics; cognitive linguistics
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