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In a subjective motion expressions motion verb is used to depict an inherently static scene. This special use of motion verbs has been one of the research focuses in Cognitive Linguistics during the past two or three decades. However, research on subjective motion, in terms of both theoretical and empirical study, still has a lot of room for development. In the field of Chinese linguistics, there has been no systemic and comprehensive study on Chinese subjective motion expressions until now. In view of this situation, and taking the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this paper examines the cognitive motivation behind the formation of subjective motion and the coding process of subjective motion expressions. First of all, by drawing on conceptual integration theory and motion event theory, we start from meaning making and analyze the cognitive motivation behind subjective motion and its linguistic structure. In the analysis, we have found that conceptual integration, conceptual metonymy and Gestalt psychology play an important part in the formation and linguistic realization of subjective motion. Subjective motion, in essence, comes from the conceptual mappings between real motion and the static scene, and the cognitive operation of conceptual integration in these two input spaces. Secondly, we start from surface linguistic structures, find their characteristics and explicate the cognitive motivation behind them. The linguistic coding of subjective motion has the following features: the choice of figures (i. e. not all entities can occur as figures in a subjective motion expression), the necessity of path information (i. e. a subjective motion expression must contain information about path) and the suppression of certain manner information (i. e. not all kinds of manner information can occur in subjective motion expressions). The above three features can also be explained from a cognitive linguistic perspective. The present study has great significance for research on spatial cognition. Subjective motion expression pertains to how people cognize and express static spatial scenes. Its formation and linguistic features reveal a human being's subjective construal of spatial categories and the creativity and dynamicity of his thinking. The study also offers insights into the cross-linguistic comparative study by proposing another issue for comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]