A Corpus-based Study Of Metaphorical Extension Of Spatial Prepositions "In", "On" And "At"

Metaphor was traditionally viewed as a set of extraordinary figurative expressions and the study on it was confined mostly to literature and rhetoric. In 1970s'many scholars found the cognitive nature of metaphors. Cognitive linguists claim that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical and the way we view the world and the way we think is very much a matter of metaphor. Thus, by taking the cognitive approach, metaphor is essentially regarded as a mapping from the source domain to the target domain. The philosophical grounding for the cognitive approach is experiential realism. Since space experience is one of the most common one in human life, people are likely to give a non-spatial concept a spatial orientation, such as MORE IS UP and FUTURE IS IN FORONT. The metaphorical mappings from spatial orientation to non-spatial domain, i.e. spatial metaphors are the focus of the present study. Spatial metaphors are image-schematic and they can be reasoned and analyzed with the parameters trajector, landmark and path. The previous researches on metaphor lay a theoretical foundation for the present study, which intends to investigate how the spatial metaphors of preposition "in", "on"or "at"are used in human conceptualization of the abstract domains. The three prepositions of "in", "on", and "at"are constructing the concept of space in the trinity of "volume (area), surface (line), and point". To find out how such a trinity is used to conceptualize other abstract domains, the instances with "in", "on"and "at"are collected from the researcher-self-built corpus. Then they are classified into six categories according to the different target domains and the distributions of each preposition with metaphorical meanings in every domain are presented. The major findings demonstrate that the three prepositions "in", "on"and "at"develop metaphorical meanings in the target domains of situation, manner, target, time, logical relation, and social relationship. Among these domains, situation and manner are more likely to be conceptualized in a three-dimensional way; the metaphorical meaning of "on"has a wide distribution in the domain of target and situation; preposition "at"has its most metaphorical extensions in the domain of time and target. The metaphorical mappings of the three prepositions "in", "on"and "at"demonstrate that there is a systematic correspondence between the image-schematic concepts and the metaphorical meanings of "in""on"and "at". This thesis provides evidence of metaphorical extensions of the prepositions through a quantitative analysis with the help of a qualitative analysis and reinforces the importance of image-schematic structure to the shaping and reasoning of spatial metaphors, which may offer some data helpful for foreign language teaching and lexicography.