PHÂN TÍCH KẾT CẤU NGỮ NGHĨA CỦA PHƯƠNG VỊ TỪ “NEI” TRONG TIẾNG TRUNG QUỐC

Abstract

The locative word “内” is a word that appears at the elementary stage in the program of learning Chinese as a foreign/ second language. The article uses a quantitative method to analyze the semantic structure of the locative word “内” on the basis of a corpus of 460,000 words. Analysis results show that the locative word “内” is mainly used to express spatial meanings, and is rarely used to express non-spatial meanings. In the spatial meanings, the locative word “内” is often used with landmarks that are three-dimensional spatial entities with borders, followed by landmarks that are two-dimensional spatial entities with borders, the least used with landmarks that are one-dimensional spatial entities, like a boundary lane. Among the types of landmarks that are three-dimensional spatial entities with borders, landmarks are the places with the highest frequency of appearance. In a non-spatial meanings, the locative word “内” is often used as a metaphor for time, rather than as a metaphor for the human body or human body parts and as a metaphor for fields.