Cognitive Research On The Semantic Of "shang/xia" In Modern Chinese Based On Chinese-English Contrast

Shang/xia is a pair of basic spatial concepts formed in the process of people’s cognitive to objective things’location in space.In syntactic level,Chinese shang/xia manifests the opposites between noun of locality and verb,directional verb.Behind this opposite surface lies the semantic connection between them.Based on the authoritative and representative corpus,under the oretical guidance of cognitive linguistics and contrastive linguistics,with the methods of description and explanation,quantitative and qualitative,contrastive analysis,from the angle of contrastive between Chinese and English,the dissertation brings the static semantic and dynamic semantic of Chinese shang/xia into an overall framework.From the cross-language commonalities and differences of shang/xia,the dissertation analizes its semantic relevance and systematicness behind syntactic opposites and reveals the relationship between conceptual structure and semantic structure.Firstly,from location meaning to action meaning and then to tendency meaning,the semantic evolution of Chinese shang/xia formed vertical chain which is based on prototype.Meanwhile,the three meanings respectively derive different extended meanings,which formed semantic horizontal network.In the evolution process,the part of speech of Chinese shang/xia derives verb and directional verb.On spatial semantic,they can express static semantic and dynamic semantic.Secondly,in static location system,Chinese shang/xia have postpositive and adhesiveness.The combination of noun and shang（NP+shang/xia）has the function of representing shapes.Thespatial shapes expressed by“NP+shang”include point,line,surface and dimension.These opposite relation on expressing spatial shapes between Chinese and English are:point---at,line and surface---on,dimension---in.The main basis of shape judge is people’s cognitive experience to NP in“NP+shang/xia”.In most cases,whether the object exists,it cannot change the spatial shapes characteristics of“NP+shang/xia”.In static location system,the spatial semantic relationships of Chinese shang includes supporting,adhering,covering,hollow,surrounding and containing（fusing andimbedding）;xia includes covering,beside,hollow and containing.Chinese shang correspond to different spatial semantic remarks like on,over,above,around,in,against in English;Chinese xia correspond to different spatial semantic remarks like under,underneath,beneath,beside,in in English.By contrast,Chinese single symbol shang/xia contains different location relationship between object and reference object.Multiple symbols are used in English to distinguish different location relationship.In the expression of spatial concepts shang/xia,Chinese location nouns present spatial relevance between objects,tending to be deductive from total to points.English prepositions distinguish different details,tending to be inductive from points to total.In the combination of“N shang/xia”,preposition zai in front of N has two conditions:revealing and screening.It illustrates,to some extent,that X has more closely connection with shang/xia not preposition.“Screening”is syntactic requirement,and“revealing”lies in its pragmatics significance.Finally,in dynamic displacement system,Chinese shang/xia and English up/down present the corresponding relationship“symbol vs.single symbols”in spatial meaning,which is different from“symbol vs.multiple symbols”in static system.Chinese and English shang/xia have commonalities on objective geographical factor and subjective psychological factor referred to shang/xia’s spatial horizontal movement and vertical movement,and have differences in language habit factor and deeper semantic factor.In nonspatial semantic types derived from spatial semantic,Chinese shang/xia and English shang/xia focus on differences,which is different from that in static system.In the process of semantic evolution,the action semantic of Chinese xia transformed,and formed a special use,that is quantifier xia.In actual,the semantic is still influenced and conditioned by verb.In“V+yixia₂”,verb classes have tendentious effect to yixia₂’s semantic characteristics.When yixia₂’s semantic characteristic is“short time”,verb’s classes mainly include mental verbs,body postures verbs and directional verbs which contain the meaning of go or leave.When yixia₂’s semantic characteristic is“low intensity”,it has quantity-reduction function to verb.