The Pragmatic Distribution and Semantic Explanation of Evidential Prepositions

Compared with other prepositions, the study on evidential prepositions, such as "ju (sic)", "an (sic)", "ping (sic)", is relatively weak. Many meanings and usages of evidential prepositions are not clear, which leads to a misunderstanding that there are few differences among them and that they can explain mutually. At the beginning of this paper, we analyze the definition of 800 words in Modern Chinese which is "(sic) (ju): (sic) (yiju)" based on the Corpus Online, and find there are obvious differences between "(sic) (ju)" and "(sic) (yiju)". So, it is not suitable to use the latter to explain the former. Then, we investigate more evidential prepositions, and find there are also significant differences among them. Based on the research above, we divide the evidential prepositions into three categories: epistemic evidence, deonitic evidence and dynamic evidence, and explain the commonness and individuality of evidential prepositions by conceptual space and semantic map.