| Space is a basic concept in human cognitive and language system. The concept of space is used to understand the concepts of others, and spatial relation is a basic existent relationship in the objective world. Any object exists in a certain space and can present the spatial relations of one kind or another with the help of human active cognition and construal. The understanding of spatial relations is one of the most basic ways to understand the world. All kinds of complicated spatial concepts, spatial locations and spatial relations can be expressed by prepositions. Many scholars both at home and abroad have done a lot of research on spatial prepositions. But the research on Chinese spatial prepositions is insufficiently through, systematic, and comprehensive at present. The research is especially weak on spatial prepositions in the space domain. In this paper, the author focuses on the path prepositions of the spatial prepositions in modern Chinese.Spatial preposition is a kind of preposition to show the relationship between things and things or things and space, or actions and things. Semantically, Spatial prepositions express the spatial state and spatial relations. The construal of the spatial meaning is based on human’s experience of the objective world. In the course of movement, the existence and displacement of things will highlight a few points, and it is generally believed that these points can present the movement of things and are the typical perspectives which people observe the movement of things. And they can semantically indicate the position, starting point, crossing point, end point and direction respectively. Among them, the starting point, crossing point and end point are all parts of the path. So they are easily to be understood and analyzed under the background of the path. It conforms to cognitive economy principle in the process of construal, and cognitive psychology and construal process in the understanding of spatial meaning. And it is easy to achieve optimal relevance since it requires the least cognitive efforts in the process of discourse understanding on the part of the hearers. Path spatial prepositions are classified according to the meanings. Starting point, crossing point and end point are the typical perspectives, and could be considered together because they all have the characteristics of the path and each is a part of the unique path schema. Path spatial prepositions include the prepositions indicating starting point, crossing point, end point and distance. The first three prepositions have an obvious tendency of dynamic with semantic characteristics of [+displacement]. The typical distance prepositions contain static semantics, which takes the path as a whole to show the value of the path length.The use of path spatial prepositions arouse people’s understanding of path schema, guides people to select an appropriate perspective of cognitive path and pays attention to the state or spatial relations of a particular spatial location. Path is a specific spatial cognitive domain, and the path schema includes starting point, end point, route, crossing point, distance and other factors. These elements are all that the speakers would like to highlight in the specific context and path cognitive domain. The path spatial prepositions can activate people’s existed understanding of the cognitive schema, guides the attention of a specific location in the path. The understanding process for path prepositions is to activate the people’s cognition on the spatial relationship or state between the position focus and the path background, and it is a revisal and specific process according to the schema in their own mind. The understanding and construal of path schema are influenced by many factors such as the meaning of the preposition itself, the semantic structure of the nominal composition after the preposition and semantic features of predicate verb, the perspective of observation and the psychological construct of the path, etc. People’s understanding of the path schema and construal in turn will also have effect on semantic construction and syntactic form of the path spatial prepositions.Human’s awareness, expression and construal of path schema reflect the interactive process and results between human and the outside world. The establishment of the spatial prepositions is relevant to the existing encyclopedic knowledge and the cognition of path schema. The understanding of the path spatial prepositions reflects not only the perceived spatial relations between the participants in the path schema but also the ability and ways to perceive the path. The observation and description of a specific path location (such as a starting point or an end point) imply a speaker’s knowledge and attitude. Especially, in the path construction of an event, the speaker and the hearer are likely to have different understandings, which will lead to the deviation in the use and understanding of the spatial prepositions. The speaker would select some specific path prepositions in order to guide the hearer’s attention on the concentrated distribution on the space location out of some motivation or purpose, so there is a certain tendency in semantics. Based on the understanding of conventional path schema, the hearer, influenced by gestalt psychology, will make psychological "correction" unconsciously. For a specific path preposition, the selection of prepositional object and determination of meaning should take into consideration of a series of factors such as cognitive psychology, discourse adaption and pragmatic motivations.This paper consists of seven chapters, and the contents are as follows:First chapter is an introduction. The author introduces the reason for selecting this topic, research purpose, previous research and research significance as well as the sources of corpus, research methods, research object and train of thoughts of the paper.In the second chapter, the author analyzes the spatial prepositions in modern Chinese and related research. Spatial prepositions often need the semantic roles to specify spatial meanings. The salience of the spatial meanings of the spatial prepositions reflects the choice of the background information and manifestation process of the speaker. The classifications and results of the spatial prepositions are related to the speaker’s perspective, attention, prepositions and spatial meaning.In the third chapter, the spatial prepositions indicating starting points are analyzed."Starting point" refers to the place where the displacements or movements begin and it is the starting position of a path. In the actual use of language,"starting point" can be used to refer to the starting point in space, time as well as cognition. The author takes "from(cong,从)" as an example to explain the grammar characteristics of starting-point prepositions in syntax, semantics and pragmatics. In terms of syntax, the composition of the object and the location of prepositional structure in a sentence are analyzed. In terms of semantics, the prepositional structure indicating the starting point has obvious dynamic semantic color, and the predicate requires semantic component of [+left].And in terms of pragmatics, the author analyzes the different understandings of the speaker and the hearer about the starting-point prepositions, and the relationship between the starting-point prepositions and the contextual information.In the fourth chapter, path prepositions related to route are discussed. The crossing route is a path between the start point and the terminal. It is a path where focal things pass, so the middle part of the path can be manifested by means of the description of the route or the positions along the route. The use of the prepositions indicating crossing points reflects the choice and confirmation for the route of the moving objects in space movement."via(jingyou,经由),down(yanzhe,沿着), along(shunzhe,顺着)" and "through(jing,经)" are the typical path prepositions.In the fifth chapter, the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic functions of the spatial prepositions indicating the end points are analyzed."End point" is on the opposite position of the "starting point ",and it is the end of the path. It contains three layers of semantics:the first one is the position where the event ends; the second is the length of the process, and the third is the result of the event. The typical preposition is "to(dao,到)".In the sixth chapter, the spatial prepositions indicating distance are discussed. Distance is a description of the attributes of the path itself, and it refers to separation between the starting point and the end point in semantics. The typical preposition is "off(li,离)". Apart from the nominal element indicating position, the prepositional structure indicating distance requires the co-occurrence of the elements indicating the meaning of quantity. While the spatial prepositions indicating distance can express both static and dynamic spatial relations, the typical path distance shows a static relationship.The seventh chapter is a summary of the paper. The main points and the conclusion of the research are summarized.In this dissertation, the author, based on the previous research, analyzes the use of the spatial prepositions indicating path in modern Chinese and tries to explain the semantic structure and grammatical features of spatial prepositions from cognitive and functional perspectives. |
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