Studies of syntax from the
cognitive-linguistic standpoint share the same goal as mainstream generative theories in specifying
the internal knowledge of language underlying syntactic structures. What sets
cognitive linguistics apart from the mainstream camp is its insistence on the restrictive condition of cognitive plausibility. Specifically, the goal of cognitive syntax is to describe the internal knowledge of language in terms of symbolic units or constructions and the way they are mentally organized into massive networks by schema-instance relations and prototype-extension relations. Current research in Chinese cognitive grammar tends to neglect the goal of describing Chinese grammar as a mentally represented system of symbolic units and shows a strong functionalist flavor in its focus on
iconicity and semantic motivation of grammatical forms. Iconicity, albeit a valid topic, plays a very limited role in cognitive syntax. Furthermore, studies of iconicity by itself do little to fulfil the goal of describing knowledge of language. To achieve this goal, one has to describe the mental network of symbolic units (or constructions) that sanction particular usage events, as illustrated in the approach adopted in this paper to studying the locative zai construction in Chinese.