Orientation Of The Word "the", "" The Significance And Evolution

"Shang" and "Xia", denoting spatial location in modern Chinese, is a pair of words of common use and multiple meanings as well. They define the space - a definition extremely important in the human cognition, and based on this spatial location meaning produce different meanings. The study of this pair of words with highest frequency of occurrence can show the characteristic of Chinese on space, and provide useful reference for the localizers denoting other spatial patterns.Departing from the relation between the representation of spatial location and the use of localizers, the dissertation explains the internal differences between "Shang" and "Xia". What's more, the reasons and the evolvement skeleton of their other mean and uses are to be discussed synchronically and diachronically by ad ng the theory of lexical bleaching and metaphor in the cognitive linguistics, thus displaying the different approaches and routes of the formation of various meanings of "Shang" and "Xia". Based on the above findings, "Shang" and "Xia" are distributed into the basic, bleaching and extensional meanings. The dissertation, based on the previous results, further enriches the understanding of "Shang" and "Xia".