The Comparative Research Of Compound Locative Words "Liwai" And "Neiwai"

“Liwai” and “Neiwai” are two compound locative words,which consist of the non-compound locative word “Wai” and its opposite non-compound locative word “Li”or “Nei”,and the two compound locative words are frequently used in modern Chinese.Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of the CCL corpus,this paper investigates the syntactic and semantic features of the two compound locative words “Liwai” and“Neiwai”.This paper is divided into three parts.The first part is the research of the syntax functions of “Liwai”and“Neiwai”.Both of them can be used alone or combined with the same syntactic constituent to act as sentence parts,but sentence parts have different emphases.In addition,reduplicated-combination of the two compound locative words can be collected in the corpus,namely “Liliwaiwai”and “Neineiwaiwai”.The syntax functions of“Liliwaiwai”and “Neineiwaiwai” have little difference with “Liwai”and “Neiwai”,but also have different emphases.The second part is the research of semantic features of “Liwai” and “Neiwai”.They can generally represent the real space and non-real space meanings,but each has its own focus.The semantics can be either “Li(Nei)”or “Wai”,or a combination of both “Li(Nei)”and “Wai”.Real space meaning can usually mean three-dimensional space or two-dimensional surface,but the specific meaning should be analyzed by combining their reference objects and context.The non-real space meaning is usually developed through the metaphor mechanism,and the specific meaning should also be analyzed with reference materials.Besides,“Liliwaiwai” and “Neineiwaiwai” are different in the selection of the reference object,and the semantics emphasizes the whole or everything.The third part is a comparative analysis,which is on the bases of previous two parts.This part has analyzed the syntactic and semantic aspects of the two compound locative words “Liwai” and “Neiwai”,thus drawing conclusions.