Functional Terms of Location in Chinese

Abstract

The usual locative pattern in Chinese is a preposition zài before the noun and a positional suffix after it. Names of countries and cities do not take the suffix. Marked place expressions normally precede the main verb but they can also be found in a post verbal position, a new tendency in Chinese. When a marked place expression modifies a noun a modifier de is added to the positional suffix and in all such cases in the corpus zài was also dropped. Zài is also dropped sometimes even when the phrase is not being used to modify a noun. In the examples examined this only occurred at the beginning of a sentence.