A Study Of Conceptualization Of Spatial-relations In "S+X" Two-character Construction In Chinese

The initial cognition of human beings originated from the cognition of space, which results in the continuous attention of fields on studies of space. At present, space is extensively used in life, involving many fields, from concrete spaces to abstract spaces. Therefore, people's cognition of meanings and usages of spatial words has further developed. In China, the cognitive processing of new social reality is affected by Chinese traditional culture and social factors, and thus giving spatial words new meanings.Spatial concepts can not only designate the tangible concrete relations, but also symbolize social identity, history, culture and judgments. Combing theories of conceptual metaphor, metonymy with construal, this thesis has constructed the MCC model to interpret the conceptualization of spatial relations and the mappings among them from socio-cognitive perspective, and the cognitive pattern of space in Cognitive Sociolinguistics based on the pattern �Reality- Cognition- Language� in Cognitive Linguistics. The objective is the two-character construction with spatial word preceded in Chinese, and the corpora are collected from the Modern Chinese Corpus, BLCU. After being processed, the corpora are 633 in number, which are divided into concrete spaces and abstract spaces. Specifically speaking, concrete spaces include bodily space, physical space, geographical space and other spaces, while abstract spaces cover temporal space, cultural-historical space, social space and mental space. Statistics of corpora indicates that social space accounts for the highest ratio, which is 27.96%. In addition, the thesis has investigated the meaning tendencies of abstract spatial words, of which �?(shang)+X� and �?(xia)+X� are prominent, having positive and negative emotions respectively. In view of this phenomenon, this thesis has explained from the dimension of Chinese traditional culture, stressing on the influence of Chinese traditional culture on the conceptualization of spatial words. The layout of this thesis is as follows: Chapter one makes an introduction of the objective, rationale and data collection; Chapter two is the literature review of spatial words' studies; Chapter three has constructed the MCC model by integrating the theories of metaphtonymy and construal; Chapter four is the systematic analysis of the corpora, covering the analyses of each spatial category and the mappings among them; Chapter five is the conclusion of the thesis, displaying main findings, implications and some suggestions for subsequent studies.As for the significance of this thesis, theoretically speaking, it structures MCC model by binding metaphtonymy and construal under the background of Cognitive Sociolinguistics to interpret the conceptualization of spatial relations, which enriches the theoretical connotation of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Practically speaking, it provides a fine classification of collected corpora and expounds spatial concepts and the mappings among them from socio-cultural perspective, rendering them rich socio-cultural connotations. Notably, once one cultural community has formed a cultural tradition of the mapping from spatial relations to social relations, then the cognitive model has been formed. In turn, this cognitive model will shape people's cultural cognition of spatial words.