| An essential means of representing spatial concepts in modern Chinese is locatives SHANG and XIA. Previous research puts too much emphasis on their grammatical structures. The semantic and cognitive study of their functions, however, has not been widely addressed. Western cognitive linguists resort mostly to image schema theory and metaphor theory as the theoretical basis for spatial particles. By comparison with functional elements analysis, this paper argues that image schema theory is not sufficient to study Chinese spatial concepts. Taking full account of context and experiential correlations, the paper investigates the modern Chinese locatives SHANG and XIA from the perspective of image schema as well as functional elements. The aim of this paper is to elaborate the relatedness between different senses and emphasize the significance of functional elements. |
PDF Full Text Request