A Study Of Spatial Metaphor Of OVER, ABOVE And ON Based On The Conceptual Integration Theory

From the cognitive perspective, this paper probes into the extensions of spatial metaphors of prepositions adopting the Conceptual Integration Theory, which is regarded as a pervasive cognitive process in the meaning construction of natural languages. Taking OVER, ABOVE and ON as examples, it investigates how their grammatical spatial Input Space I1 is connected with another Input Space I2, thus constructing a new Blended Space. The corpus of the thesis is established by extracting from nine dictionaries, two New Concept English (band 3 and 4), and Born to Win.The paper consists of five chapters with the first three parts focusing mainly on the background, literature review and theoretical foundations of the study. The fourth chapter is the main body of this paper. Firstly, a qualitative study is conducted to define how to specify prepositions'spatial senses based on the Image Schema. Then the author discusses how the spatial senses are extended into distinct senses. Finally, it is found that the metaphorical extensions of OVER are mainly reflected in the domains of "power and society", "duration", and "quantity", with its major extended meanings being "more than", "duration", "target", and "control". OVER can be replaced with ABOVE when it means "more than", and with ON when it means "by means of. The last chapter reaches a conclusion that CIT can be used to explain the metaphorical extensions of prepositions.