An analysis of the semantic structure of the Chinese locative word “里

Abstract

The locative word “里” is a word that appears at the elementary stage in the program of learning Chinese as a foreign or second language. The article uses a quantitative method to analyze the semantic structure of the locative word “里” on the basis of a corpus of 320,000 words. The analysis results show that the locative word “里” is mainly used to express spatial meanings, and is rarely used to express non-spatial meanings. In the spatial meanings, it is often used with landmarks that are three-dimensional spatial entities. In the non-spatial meanings, it is often used as a metaphor for source of information or medium of information transmission, metaphor for agencies and organizations, metaphor for human body parts.