On The Noun Of Locality Of Pre-Qin Days

Humans' cognition of time and space is necessarily reflected to the expressions of languages, which take on some diversity because of the nationalities. The nouns of locality are the basic phraseology of expressing the orientation, which are not unchanging. They change with the development of the language and the increasing meticulous thinking.This paper focuses on studying the nouns of locality out of the nineteen books of pre-Qin days closely, delineating them in order that we can draw the outline of the nouns of locality. There is a relative spot associated with the situation context when the nouns of locality express the orientation. On the other hand, the word "east", "west", "south", "north" and the compound words which are composed of those have another relative recessive spot, that is the sun. As the relative spot is the part of the meaning of the word, we call them the noun of sun-orientated and we call the words the noun of personal-orientated such as "left", "right", "above", "below", "front", "back", "in", "out" and so on. The emergence of the space words is a qualitative leap, which shows a new stage of the cognition of the environment where people exist. These words such as north-east, south-west that also show the expression of space develop from inaccuracy to accuracy. In pre-Qin days , the noun of locality can freely act as adverbial, and in this period prepositional phrase and the noun of the locality designating the orientation in the germination-period are the two aspects of the phenomenon.The concept of the orientation and the substantiality has been detached, but not entirely. For example, "left" can refer to the direction, and still it can refer to the left hand.When do the prepositional phrases replace the nouns of locality acting as adverbial? When do the nouns of locality detach from the substantiality entirely and form genuine nouns of locality? These topics are the continuous research.