A Study Of Chinese Direction Words:"qian,hou,shang,xia"

This paper studied the Spatial and Temporal System in Modern Chinese with the concepts and theories from cognitive linguistics and semantics. The main objects of the studying were the words of locality "qian","hou","shang","xia". It proposed a construction for the "Spatial and Locative System" in Modern Chinese, discussed the cognitive inference related with the directions which are expressed by the words of locality, and investigated the manifestation of "qian", "hou", "shang", "xia".Chapter 1 is the prologue which talked about the objects, meaning, scope and methods of the research, and enumerated all the data used in the paper. It pointed out that there are four characteristics in Modern Chinese "Spatial System": 1) Temporal Space, Spatial Space and Abstract space(including quantity, scope, etc.) share the same linguistic system which we called "Spatial System", i.e., an abstract semantic model composed of several coordinate axis. 2) There is a special grammatical method in Chinese language—the words of locality which represent pure directions, thus act as the core of the "Spatial System". 3) The grammatical category of "Location" is the middle-level between "Direction" and "Event", and separates the Spatial Direction and Event Direction in Modem Chinese. 4) The confirmation of the Spatial Direction involves a series of flexible cognitive inferences.Chapter 2 summarized previous researches on "Spatial and Locative System" and the words of locality.Chapter 3 studied the sub-systems of the "Spatial System". 1. It separated 3-D space, 2-D space, temporal space and abstract space (focused on the first 3). 3-D space/2-D space belong to the same category in syntactic model; but 2-D space/ temporal space /abstract space share the same category when we talked about how to confirm the spatial direction. 2. It investigated a spatial system proposed by Mr. Qi Huyang, and argued that there is necessity to modify this system. 3. It enumerated a series of grammatical forms which are involved in the "Spatial System", and pointed out that there exits a relation among these forms: words representing "Spatial and Locative"→ phrases representing "Spatial and Locative"→ sentences representing "Spatial and Locative". 4. It clarified the semantic scopes and semantic constructions of these forms, and their matching between grammatical meanings and grammatical forms. Finally we got four sub-systems: 1) Direction, which can be divided into "Substance Interior Direction" and "Substance Exterior Direction;" 2). "Location," which can be divided into "Part", "Region", "Entity" and "Range"; 3). Events without direction, which can be divided into "location confirmation", "location as topic", "location where an event takes place" (or "the place where the subject or object is"); 4). Events with direction, which can be divided into "Events with displacement" and "Events without displacement".