Preface

Dr.Longbo Ren's monograph funded by the Ministry of Education and Henan University of Science and Technology will be published．He sent the manuscript version and invited me to write a preface for it．As the supervisor of his doctoral dissertation，I am very happy to recommend this book．

Dr.Longbo Ren has a high ideological and political consciousness and profound professional knowledge．He has a high responsibility for scientific research as well as a strong academic ability．He has always been down-to-earth，diligent and eager to learn．During his doctoral study，he read extensively in Cognitive Linguistics and related fields．His research direction is spatial cognition and spatial representation in the cognitive system of language．He read a large number of articles in both domestic Chinese core journals and international English journals in the field of spatial construction．He has an in-depth knowledge of the Talmyan Cognitive Semantics，including the main content，the development history，the current trends，the main research methods，and the core issues yet to be dealt with in this field．

How language structures space is a universal topic in the field of linguistics．In this field，the spatial research of Stephen C.Levinson's team at Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics（Nijmegen，Niederlande）in Europe and the fundamental system of spatial schemas oflanguage proposed by Leonard Talmy have great influence．However，there are many differences between the two theoretical systems．The Talmyan Cognitive Semantics is the most advanced theory in Cognitive Semantics．This book is an empirical study in the Talmyan Cognitive Semantic theory based on English and Chinese data．The author proposes some original ideas and the book represents the latest major achievement in this field．To be more specific，the analysis of the spatial representation mechanism of language has a novel theoretical perspective supported with empirical data．The description and discussion are comprehensive and in-depth，which may impress the audience deeply．

This book also provides a comprehensive and in-depth discussion of the conceptualization of the Talmyan stationary events and their representational types，proposes the theory of“Overlapping Systems of Cognition Organization in Spatial Stationary Events” and supports the universality of language in spatial construction．This book combines qualitative and quantitative methods to reveal a large number of similarities in the spatial semantic representations，which share common cognitive basis in the two languages．It also pointed out some differences in spatial representation between English and Chinese．For example，English respondents pay more attention to the co-events before the main event，while Chinese respondents emphasize more on the subsequent events after the main event．Those findings are inspiring for us in our efforts to identify the commonality and types of locative positional words． The research questions raised in this study have some important theoretical insights，the experimental design is scientific，and the conclusions have great theoretical significance．

The focus of the book is to explore the spatial stationary events represented in Mandarin Chinese，and the corpus data obtained in the elicitation experiment are mainly Mandarin．However，to facilitate a wider audience，especially those who are not familiar with Mandarin，the book provides English examples in the analysis．Readers with a good knowledge of Mandarin may skip over them and read Chinese examples in Mandarin directly．

Although the examples given in this book are mainly in Mandarin，the mechanism and typology of deep semantic representation of spatial stationary events explored so far are universal，and the conclusions should also be applicable to other languages．Leonard Talmy has given a detailed qualitative description of spatial representation in English in his works．This book，especially the systematic empirical research，is the first attempt to explore the cognitive semantics of spatial stationary event representation in Mandarin．Such events are diverse and complicated in their surface forms of representation，but the book is unique in using the approach of construction grammar，by which many expressions of stationary events are classified into two main typologies，based on Talmy's dichotomy typology， which is highly general． This is another innovation of this book．

The stationary event is an important part of Talmy's theory of motion events．Unfortunately in the past few decades，it has been largely ignored，the vast majority of literature concerned only the translocationary motion events，and hence，the book can make up for this gap．

Fuyin Li
May 1，2023
School of Foreign Languages
Beihang University