A Cognitive-semantic Study Of Locative Terms In The Miao Language

China has long since been a multinational country with a long history of 5 thousand years and splendid culture.Among all those nationalities in China,the Miao nationality,an ethnic group belonging to South China,gets confirmed by the Chinese government to be included in its list of the 55 official minority groups.As one of the civilized minority groups,the Miao nationality has developed its own language-the Miao minority language.Belonging to the Miao-Yao branch in Sino-Tibetan language family,the Miao minority language possesses so many varieties but no unified written words.Just owing to the very reason,the Miao language has been difficult to protect and inherit.Moreover,with the development of economy in recent years,an increasing number of Miao people who used to live in remote areas migrate to downtown areas for the purpose of better development.In this case,for the facility of communication with Han people who are dominant in the population they choose to speak Mandarin Chinese most of the time and use their own minority language only when communicating with their family members.Some families even give up teaching their offspring the minority language.This thesis is aimed to find out the usage of Miao locatives to interpret the conceptualization and representation of spatial relations by Miao people.Inspired and supported by the Minority Language Project of Hunan University,the thesis chooses the Jiwei Miao variety in Huayuan County,Xiangxi Autonomous Prefecture as the research object and the field work as the research method,and obtains the Miao expressions of space and motion through the elicitation task,aiming to address the following four questions:(1)What is the grammar of Miao locatives?(2)What is the lexical class of Miao locatives?(3)What image schemas do Miao locatives represent?(4)What are the differences and similarities between Miao locatives and Mandarin Chinese ones?Through the analysis of the experiment data,the thesis finds out that Miao locatives are preposed,function as the subject,predicate,object and adverbial,and are N-derived.Miao locatives vary in image schema as a result of semantic meaning.By comparing Miao locatives and Mandarin Chinese ones,the thesis concludes that they are highly similar,confirming that they belong to the same language family.