A Comparative Analysis of Conceptualization and Syntax Strategy in Korean and Chinese ‘Temperature’ Domain

This paper reached the following results after contrasting and examining the conceptualization and syntactic structure of the temperature domain in Korean and Chinese from a lexical typological perspective.There are three frames in the temperature domian: tactile temperature, ambient temperature, and personal-feeling temperature.In Korean, 'cha(kap)ta, ttu-kep-ta' refers to tactile temperature, while 'chwup-ta, tep-ta' refers to both ambient and personal feeling temperature. In Chinese, however, 'leng-re(冷-熱)' basically covers all three frames, but 'bing-tang(冰-烫)' with a high scale is expressed alone in detail in the case of tactile temperature, and ambient temperature is represented alone by the two-syllable word 'yanre(炎熱)' and 'hanleng(寒冷)'.Syntactic structure distinguishes frames that cannot be distinguished by lexical items. For the 'personal-feeling temperature' frame, both Korean and Chinese use 'the experiencer as an intransitive subject strategy', while Chinese also employs 'the experiencer as a transitive subject strategy' concurrently. For the 'ambient temperature' frame, both Korean and Chinese use 'the intransitive strategy', but Korean also employs 'the zero-argument strategy' concurrently.