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(1)How do meanings of under and xia extended from the basic spatial ones to themetaphorical ones?

(2)How are under and xia semantically equivalent to each other,and how are theydifferent in the core meanings and the extended meanings?

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Cognitive Studies of Under

As already mentioned above,localizers generally refer to prepositions that indicateorientation in English.It is believed that the English is a prepositional one.Prepositionis a part of speech with the strongest personality and the most complex semantics inEnglish.Traditional semantics tends to regard prepositions as a lexical class with onlygrammatical meaning in addition to lexical meaning,which is not in-depth and lackssystematic theoretical explanation.However,from the perspective of cognitive linguists,prepositions have many more meanings besides lexical meanings,and these meaningsalso form a complex semantic network.Taylor(1995)argued that the most meaningfulwords in English and other languages are prepositions.

Since the 1980s,cognitive linguistics has emerged as an effective method to thestudy of language.Although it is a relatively new discipline,it is expected to contributegreatly to semantic studies and second language acquisition and teaching.Spatial termssuch as prepositions,are one of the focuses of cognitive linguistic studies,because theyprovide an important approach for us to explore how humans perceive spatial relations and categorize things.As one of the most common spatial relations,the semantic studyof the localizer under will be mainly sorted out below.

2.2 Cognitive Studies of Xia

This section will review the previous cognitive studies on xia by domestic andforeign scholars.The spatial concepts in Chinese is usually characterized by localizers.Among them,xia is one of the main localizers to express the spatial concepts.At present,less attention has been paid to xia than shang.

The cognition of Chinese localizers is less studied by foreign scholars.HilaryChappell(2008)and others classified Chinese localizers into“prepositions,postpositions and frame prepositions”.They provided the general outlines for theevolution of the system of localizers through different stages of Chinese.The finalresearch proposed that the Prototype model,rather than the Basic Meaning model,canbe applied to explain this process of semantic change.

So far,there are not many domestic studies on the cognitive semantics of xia alone,and most scholars discuss shang and xia together or conduct comparative studies.

The study of localizers in China first began in Ma Jianzhong’s Ma’s Grammar(1898),in which Ma considered“zuo,you,zhong,wai,shang,xia”to be“Jing zi”,i.e.,he classified these words as descriptive words.In 1938,the reform of Chinese grammarbegan,and the discussion mainly focused on the classification of words.As far as thestudy of localizers is concerned,different scholars had expressed their own opinions onthe lexicality of localizers.Zhu Dexi’s Lecture Notes on Grammar(1961)and ZhaoYuanren’s A Grammar of Spoken Chinese(1948)considered localizers to be a separatecategory of words.Zhu Dexi proposed that localizers could be divided into simplelocalizers and compound本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。