A Comparative Study on the Semantic Mapping Mechanisms of Walking-related Semantic Components and Roots in Chinese and English

This paper uses “Walking Semantics” as an entry point to comparatively analyze the semantic mapping mechanisms between Chinese character semantic radicals and English word roots. The research objects include eight core Chinese semantic radicals (止, 彳, 夂, 夊, 辶, 行, 走, 足) and nine English roots (-ced-, -gress-, -it-, etc.) along with their derived words. The study finds that both Chinese and English “walking semantics” symbols take bodily walking experiences as their cognitive starting point, though Chinese semantic radicals originate from pictographic abstraction while English roots are largely borrowed from Latin. Although both languages extend from spatial to abstract domains through metaphor and metonymy, significant differences exist: Chinese focuses on various movement elements, achieving multi-dimensional semantic extension, while English concentrates on movement direction, predominantly using directional metaphors, reflecting the holistic versus analytical cognitive thinking differences between Eastern and Western cultures. The research also identifies 34 pairs of semantically corresponding words, whose commonalities stem from embodied cognitive foundations, while unidirectional mappings are influenced by language history, encoding strategies, and grammaticalization pathways. This study provides cognitive pathway references for Chinese-English teaching and empirical support for cross-cultural cognitive research.