Expression of the inclusion relationship in contemporary Chinese

Abstract

Among the 16 monosyllabic localizers (fāngwèicí) of contemporary Chinese, li ‘in’, zhōng ‘middle’ and nèi ‘inside, within’ are specifically related to expressing the inclusion relationship between objects. There exist both similarities and differences in the use of li, zhōng and nèi, not only in the expression of concrete spatial relationships, but also in their metaphorical meaning. This paper aims at sketching and analyzing these three localizers through their similarities, with a specific focus on their differences, from the perspective of cognitive psychology and on the basis of a fi ne-grained corpus analysis. Our recent research has shown that in most cases, li implies the fullness and wholeness of the reference object, zhōng refers to a large space or a large range, and nèi emphasizes the boundaries of the reference object. Another difference exists in their ability to combine with a predicative element: nèi cannot be used before a predicative element, li sometimes precedes a predicative element, while the combination of zhōng and a predicative element is quite frequent due to the grammaticalization of zhōng. Our study, based on a large corpus collected from different sources, also shows the importance of text style in choosing a localizer.