ANALYSIS OF THE SEMANTIC STRUCTURE OF THE CHINESE LOCATIVE WORD “NEI”

Hớn Vũ Lưu

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Abstract

The locative word “” 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 “” on the basis of a corpus of 460,000 words. Analysis results show that the locative word “” is mainly used to express spatial meanings, and is rarely used to express non-spatial meanings. In the spatial meanings, the locative word “” 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 “” 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.

 

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Hớn Vũ Lưu,

Khoa Ngoại ngữ

References

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