A Contrastive Study of Directional Lexemes in Mandarin and Malay

Abstract

Directional lexemes form a core lexical category encoding spatial relations and serve as a vital interface between linguistic forms and human spatial cognition. Mandarin from the Sino‑Tibetan family and Malay belonging to the Austronesian family follow universal spatial‑cognition principles yet display prominent language‑specific characteristics shaped by syntactic structures, conceptual frameworks and local sociogeographic contexts. Directional lexemes regularly create obstacles for bilingual communication, translation practice and second‑language instruction. Adopting contrastive analysis and cognitive‑linguistic spatial frame‑of‑reference theory, this paper compares Mandarin and Malay directional lexemes across taxonomy, semantic properties, syntactic behaviour and pragmatic conventions. Drawing on written corpora, pedagogical materials and authentic bilingual data from Malaysian Chinese communities, this study identifies cross‑linguistic correspondences, summarises typical interlanguage errors produced by L1‑Malay Mandarin learners and proposes targeted pedagogical measures. The findings reveal major typological divergences: Mandarin possesses productive derivational morphology and supports extensive metaphorical projection from concrete spatial meanings onto temporal, social and logical domains; Malay depends heavily on phrasal constructions and largely restricts directional semantics to physical spatial reference. This research delivers empirical evidence and theoretical references for Malay‑Mandarin bilingual teaching, cross‑linguistic translation and contrastive linguistic research.