Adpositionally Encoded Space Relation In German

Because of their complicated syntactic and semantic features,German local prepositions have long played an important role in the field of German grammar.In traditional grammar,the study of German local prepositions focuses on the opposite analysis of the semantic categories"path" and "place," paying close attention to case allocation in prepositional phrases.With the emergence of cognitive linguistics,the universal grammatical modeling of space relations is introduced into the study of local-prepositional phrases in German,which aims to explain the phenomenon of dative coded motion and to establish a cognitive model that can cover all German prepositions.So far,however,the existing models are still flawed,which is mainly reflected in the following aspects:1.Some German local prepositions,such as "von" and "aus"are not covered.2.Some "place" nouns,such as latitude,longitude and chess notation,can not be explained by the existing models,3.There are no satisfactory explanatory models for the pragmatic properties of some prepositions.4.The models are limited to the sentence level.In order to solve the above problems,the present work uses cognitive grammar as a methodology and Talmy's space construction as basics to form a new universal model for the spatial relation.Then the local prepositions in German will be interpreted with this new model to provide a new way of solving the controversial problems of German local prepositions.Finally,some useful suggestions are presented for teaching local prepositions in German.This paper consists of the preface,the main part(five chapters in total),the conclusion,the bibliography and the appendix.In the first two chapters,the current state of research of local prepositions is presented,the theoretical background of the present work is explained,and the concepts about space and cognition are defined.The third chapter describes the shortcomings of Talmy's space construction.The "place"-parameter is added and its important role in the space construction is analyzed in order to redefine the adpositionally coded space relation.The fourth chapter explores the inner relationship between "place" and entities,analyzes the role of"place" in space relations,and interprets the dialectical relationship between "dynamic" and"static" to establish a new universal model for space relations.The fifth chapter uses the new model to analyze the "place" property of prepositional phrases in German at the base domain level and to analyze the "geometry" property at the normal domain level.Together with the illustration,a new interpretation of these properties is given to classify the local prepositions in German.In the sixth chapter,based on the conclusions of previous chapters,a new solution to the existing controversies in the German language is presented.The seventh chapter gives a brief summary and some useful suggestions for teaching local prepositions in German.Under the general language category,the main conclusions of this paper are as follows:1."Place" is an important parameter in the research on the cognition of the space category and has an indispensable position in the context of space construction and space modeling.Therefore,the adpositionally coded space relation is actually "space relation between entities"and can be subdivided into "direct space relation" and "indirect space relation".2.The movement can be considered as the change of the space relation.The change of the space relation that is not profiled is consistent with the static localization at the space relation level.However,when the change of the space relation is profiled,the space evoked by the modifying entity and the event evoked by the time are profiled.In the context of German grammar,the main conclusions of the present work are as follows:1.The semantic and pragmatic differences of the prepositions lie in which domain are retrieved from the NP and whether they form the profile of the NP.2.The case allocation of German local prepositions is related to the profiling of motion.The accusative can be considered as the marker of profiling the change of the space relation,while the dative fits the situations where the change of the space relation is not profiled or the space relation does not change.3.The geometric features such as "boundary","reference object" and "reference system" have important influence on the semantics and pragmatics of local prepositions in German.The achievement of the goal can be explained by vagueness the border.The significance of the present work is that the spatial construction is optimized by the cognitive semantics and a new model of the space relation is established.Based on this model,the local prepositions in German are reinterpreted to answer the controversial questions.The research results of the present work are intended to provide theoretical support for research on spatial relation coding in the context of universal grammar and to provide practical instructions for teaching local prepositions in the context of German grammar.