Spatial Adjective "high" Semantic Cognition Research

The cognitive linguistics holds that space is concrete and perceptible, and people’s understanding of the outside world is based on the concept of space. In Chinese language, lots of metaphors for many non-spatial concepts is on the ground of spatial concepts. Therefore, the spatial words and phrases are always the focus of Linguistic studies. The spatial adjective "gao"(the Chinese equivalence meaning "tall") is the only spatial adjective describing the height of both the object itself and the location of the object. In this dissertation, we focus our study on the congitive semantics of the spatial adjective"gao"To fully understand and analyze the semantics of "gao", based on the previous studies and the cognitive linguistics family resemblance theory, we summed up the semantic features of all the spatial adjectives."Gao"itself has [+upwards],[+one-dimensional],[ilocation][-cross-section],[+overpass] semantic features.According to the dictionary and sentences corpus, we summarize the meanings of "gao" on all items, including the basic meaning of the spatial field, the metaphorical meaning of the non-spatial fields and the scalar metonymy meaning. According to semantic analysis theory, image schema theory, metaphor theory and metonymy theory of the cognitive linguistics, we point out the motives and means of metaphor projection and metonymy projection of "gao" in all non-spatial fields."Gao"has two oppotise"d1"(the Chinese equivalence meaning "low") and "ai"(the Chinese equivalence meaning "short"), which are also spatial adjectives. Based on their semantic features, we are trying to find the differences between gao"and"d1","ai"in semantic, pragmatic, syntax and other aspects, and then identify the reasons of those differences, to make up for the gaps in previous stories.In this dissertation, we want to extend the research ideas to the entire spatial adjectives category, provide a reference for Typology research on spatial adjectives, Polysemy research and the metaphor phenomenon study of modern Chinese language, and provide a theoretical basis for the current foreign language teaching.