Clausal Representation Of Fictive Motion Events

The investigation on spatial semantics has been one of the top concern in recent years. Langacker's trajectory/landmark and Levinson's spatial frames of reference are important standpoints in the study of spatial semantic relations. Talmy discusses fictive motion systematically with regard to its classification, governing principles and cognitive basis. Halliday also sets forth the viewpoint of semantic space construed by circumstantial elements. This thesis is mainly concerned with the linguistic representation of fictive motion events in spatial relations and its research strictly falls onto the phenomena of fictive motion in spatial semantics.Fictive motion is the crucial drive in the representation of clausal events and its previous study concentrates on its coextension path. This thesis probes into the important functions of spatial semantics in the representation of fictive motion events.In research methods, this thesis mainly carries out Talmy's descriptive methods of featuring fictive motion events with the help of analytical modes of Halliday's transitivity system. With CLAWS4 and AntConc3.2.0, this thesis does corpus processing for the evidences of fictive motion events in the self-made corpora and quantitatively analyzes the representative mechanism of spatial semantics of fictive motion events.The above study finds that the process types of transitivity system mainly include the material clause and the existential clause, and its circumstantial element is largely realized by spatial prepositional phrases, particularly in the realization of locative circumstance. This proves that spatial prepositional phrases are an important lexicogrammatical resource in the representation of fictive motion events. In addition,fictive motion events are mainly realized by motion verbs of manner and path while the non-motion verbs rarely occur in the fictive motion event. This forms an important lexical mode of fictive motion events. The above theoretical study and evidential analysis are helpful for the deep understanding of fictive motion events and instructive for the study of motion verbs.