On The Study Of The Structure "Nouns Of Human Organ+'Shang (上)'/'Xia (下)'" And Its Cognitive Explanation

In this paper,we take the structure "nouns of human organ+'Shang(上)'/'Xia(下)'"for research object, mainly because this structure is rather special.On the one hand,some of the structures denote the menning of location,but others don't.On the other hand,in some of the structures that don't denote the meaning of location,the ways of semantic extension are not the same.Previous metaphorical explanation of localizers'grammaticalization in the structures has its limitation. For these reasons, we need to conduct in-depth study of the structure.Firstly, we make a comparatively detailed investigation into the syntactic and semantic characteristics of the structure which denotes location or non-location by using descriptive methods of structuralism. By investigation,we find that the syntactic and semantic characteristics of the structure "nouns of human organ+'Shang(上)'/'Xia(下)'"which has the metonymically-semantic extension are rather different from those of the structure which denotes the abstract meaning of location.Secondly, this paper investigates the symmetry and asymmetry of the structure"nouns of human organ+'Shang(上)'"Xia(下)'",especially the asymmetry.The asymmetry of the structure has three manifestations:the aspect of collocations,the aspect of expressing meaning and the aspect of degree of grammaticalization.Afterwards, the causes which lead to the asymmetry of the structure are discussed briefly,which mainly relate with semantic characteristics of the structure's components.Thirdly, this paper explains the semantic extension of the structure from two aspects:metaphorically and metonymically.Meanwhile this paper thinks that metaphor and metonymy play different roles in the course of the grammaticalization of the localizers in the structure. Metaphor leads to generalization of function and metonymy leads to disablement of function. Afterwards lexicalization of the structure is discussed briefly, metrical structure and frequency of use are considered as possible reseasons for causing lexicalization of the structure.