| Space is a fundamental human experience. Since the stable nature of space is constrained by a few universally powerful facts about geometry of the world, the language representation is actually also defined by them.According to Anna Wierzbicka (1972) and her colleagues, these common concepts among different people are the semantic core shared by all languages. After several decades of investigating diverse languages, the irreducible semantic cores for different languages are found, which are constituted by a versatile set of the most basic words beyond any further explanation in one language. These words are called semantic primitives. Currently, many languages have been experimented, such as English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese and etc.. In combination of the systematic explication rules, Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory is born. And there is a category to define space semantic primitives.These space semantic primitives originate from empirical investigation and introspection of language without statistical data support. This study tends to test whether the theory is applicable to Chinese in a corpus-based approach. Taking English space semantic primitive "inside" and its Chinese counterparts "li" and "limian " as a breakthrough, the author utilizes statistical processing method to testify the null hypothesis that there is no significant difference between "inside" and "li" and "limian " and relevant analysis and explanations are also provided.The major findings can be generalized as follows: there is significant difference of the distributions between English semantic primitive "inside" and its Chinese counterparts "li" and "limian". Their collocations are also diverse, which are respectively classified and analyzed. "inside " is often put before a noun as constituent of locative adverbial at a syntactical level while "li" and "limian " are more flexible than "inside" both at a collocation and syntax level due to language peculiarities.
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