| Modern Chinese spatial system can be divided into three systems: seat system, location system and form system. Among them, spatial location system plays the most important role as it helps to cognize the space relationship. Spatial location system is mainly composed of three elements: the object, the location of the object, and the existing way of the object, and “the existing way” acts as the key factor to express spatial location relationship.In this article, the author attempted to study the verbs used in the expression of spatial location from three perspectives: syntactic, semantic and cognitive.Firstly, the author summarized the researches on spatial issues. Researches on cognitive language mainly concentrate on the spatial metaphor, the image schema, and the English prepositions. Due to the difference between Chinese and English, the space researches of Chinese lexical system pay major attention to the direction words and the location words. However, verbs play an important role in the expression of space location. As a result, it is essential to study the verbs used in the expression of space location.Secondly, the author discussed the concept of spatial location. Two types of spatial location were concluded from semantic point of view: motionless spatial location system and motion spatial location system. Based on the figure-ground theory, the author analyzed the character difference of verbs in motionless system, and then further divided the motionless spatial location system into two systems: absolute motionless spatial location and relative motionless spatial location.Taking the verbs used in the expression of spatial location as the research objects, the paper analyzed the corresponding relationship between the meaning and the form of this kind of words based on the language facts. Furthermore, characteristics of verbs in different spatial location were studied from syntactic and semantic point of view. On this basis, the author discussed the rules of classifying the subclasses of verbs, distinguish motionless verbs from motion verbs, and draw the vocabulary list of those verbs. The principle of using verbs in different space locations were analyzed from cognitive perspective. Reference substances are prior to objects in motionless spatial location; while it is just reverse in motion spatial location. However, the connotation of the same words turned out to be quite different. In our opinion, when used in expressing motionless spatial location, verbs have “adhesiveness” characteristics like “+existing” and “+condition”, so stative verbs expressing objective existences, such as “have” and “be”, and existing condition of objects are typical examples used in expressing absolute motionless spatial location. On the other side, in expressing motion spatial location, the location of the object turns from one to two for the unfixed location of the object, and the existing way of the object becomes a motional displacing process. Therefore, verbs are given the characteristics of “displacing”, and verbs that can be used in motion spatial location are non-stative verbs.In this article, the author attempted to study the verbs used in the expression of Chinese spatial location from syntactic, semantic and cognitive perspectives to establish a relatively complete system of verbs used in modern Chinese spatial location system, hoping to help people form a clear cognition towards verbs used in spatial location expressions, which will be both instructive in theory and meaningful in practice in grasping the method and characteristics of Han people to cognize objective substances. |
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