A Cognitive Approach To Polysemy In Typical Chinese And English Spatial Prepositions

As a pervasive semantic phenomenon across languages, polysemy has been given a systematic and extensive study, but there is not much attention shown to spatial polysemous words. This thesis is a study of the spatial words carried out within the framework of cognitive linguistics which sees the different senses of a polysemous item. These senses are related by means of image schema transformation and metaphorical mapping. Describing spatial words by image schema offers a good way for the differentiation of similar spatial words, while analysis on the metaphorically extended meanings will make different senses get associated in a more systematic way.This paper consists of four parts. The first chapter presents the theoretical background for the analysis. A general introduction to cognitive linguistics is given first, followed by the basic notions proposed by cognitive linguists for the discussion of the spatial words.The second part firstly gives a brief introduction about prepositions including a brief summary about the traditional research in spatial conception and Space perception and spatial relationships in cognitive psychology, in addition, the definition of polysemy and polysemy in cognitive linguistics are also introduced.The third part analyzes and compares two pairs of the most typical English and Chinese spatial words from a cognitive view. Image schema transformation motivates the meaning extension from the central meaning to other spatial meanings, which in turn are mapped onto quantity, state and social domains by conceptual metaphor.The last part serves as a conclusion of the whole thesis: through the comparative study between spatial equivalents in Chinese and English, the result shows that language usage is closely connected with the social, cultural and psychological foundation, and people understand metaphorically extended meanings by way of cognitive association in different contexts.