The Origins and Patterns of Functional Expansion of the Chinese Locative Prepositions

According to semantic sources, the locative prepositions in the history of the Chinese language and in modern Chinese dialects can be divided into fifteen subcategories under five categories, the typical syntactic formats of which are "Prep + Place N + VP" and "VP + Prep + Place N", which affect the functional expansion. According to the relative position before and after the action, the nouns can be roughly divided into four kinds : locative source (ablative), location, path and direction (allative). Most locative prepositions can introduce a variety of location nouns. From the cross dialectal synchronic perspective, the location and the locative source, the location and the direction, the locative source and the path have bidirectional evolution relations. From the diachronic perspective, the evolution of each type of words is unidirectional.