Spatial And Non-spatial Senses Of Zai: A Study Within The Cognitive Linguistic Framework

The polysemy phenomenon has always been the hot topic of linguistic research; different schools have different explanations from different aspects. Cognitive-semantic studies of polysemy structures have succeeded in uncovering motivation and order behind previously random-looking grouping of meanings. For example, Brugman, Lakoff and Tyler's research of English preposition over testified that the polysemous senses of a lexical word are a semantic network centered around one or more prototypes through cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor, metonymy and image-schema. The various senses are related to each other by family resemblance. As a most frequently used Chinese word, Zai has developed polysemous usages in its semantic evolution, most previous studies of Zai are centered on the syntactic level, that is, the description of syntactic distribution of Zai and Zai structures and the collocation of verbs. However, the study on the semantic level remains empty. Thus the thesis approaches it objective on the study of polysemy of Zai within the cognitive linguistic framework, and tries to give a well-motivated account of the polysemous senses.Both the lexical and grammatical polysemy of Zai would be discussed in the present study. It is assumed that conceptual metaphor and image-schema are the two most important cognitive mechanisms during the semantic extensions. Through container metaphor and location schema, Zai obtained non-spatial senses in temporal, state and various abstract domains. By searching the obtainable historical data, we proved the spatial sense is the primary sense of Zai. Here we can interpret non-spatial senses as quasi-spatial senses, because the non-spatial domains are depicted in terms of spatial senses by metaphorical mapping, actually they are metaphorical space usages. Zai can introduce time, for example: "Zai xiatian" (in summer), "xiatian" (the period of summer) is regarded as a bounded space.As a time adverb, Zai expresses the progressive meaning, for instance: "ta Zai kan shu" (he is reading), "kan shu" (reading) is interpreted as a container, in which "ta" (he) located in it, i.e. (he is reading); we can also explain this by location schema, as a aspect marker, (i.e. indicating progressive state), the grammaticalization of Zai can be depicted as: locative verb>locative preposition>aspect marker (Gao 2005) . Locative preposition is derived form locative with the location schema abstracted from the verb. Similarly, the spatial relations are projected into the abstract domains, such as "Zai zheci fengbo dangzhong" (in this accident), "Zai yipian xuanhua sheng zhong" (in this noise), "fengbo" (event) and "xuanhua sheng" (noise) are interpreted in terms of spatial relations with the framework "Zai... zhong".The paper further proves the efficiency of cognitive linguistic theories such as conceptual metaphor and image schema in explaining the polysemy problem. Furthermore, conclusion drawn form the present study is consistent with the common human cognitive rules, that is, human beings tend to comprehend abstract things in terms of concrete things, time in terms of space, and spatial domains in terms of non-spatial domains. And this tendency is characterized by the unidirectionality.