A Cognitive Semantic Research On "over" And Its Implication To English Language Teaching

Prepositions, as one of the two mainstreams in the English vocabulary as verbs, play as the most active part of speech in the English language. Due to the complexities of their usages, prepositions contribute so much difficulty to the English language learning as to be the attentional focus of grammarians and linguistic researchers all the time. The traditional method of teaching prepositions is to list all meanings of a word, and then illustrate them with sentences. Learning prepositions by this method usually leads to the mechanical recitation without cognition of the word meanings. Since cognitive linguistics born in the 1970s provides original explanations for language on the basis of human cognition, it eventually finds an alternative way to the analysis of prepositions.The goal of this thesis is to study the various meanings of preposition over from cognitive semantic perspective by employing cognitive metaphorical theory, and to explore an effective way of teaching prepositions to Chinese students as well. Although a lot of studies have been made on prepositions and a lot of findings have been found, the applied researches on prepositions are still quite rare. Because of this, the present research is carried out from two perspectives: the meanings of over and the teaching of over. In the first place, the meanings of over are studied in the light of cognitive metaphorical theory. After that, an experiment is carried out based on the cognitive studies on over in Chinese students' English classes. Then data and information are collected and analyzed to test the efficiency of this approach. The result shows that the students taught with the cognitive semantic approach have a better understanding of the meanings of over than those taught with the traditional approach. Moreover, even though some phrasal verbs with over have not been taught, the former still perform better than the latter. The findings tell us that the students taught with the cognitive semantic approach are more active in finding the principles underlying lexical learning. The cognitive semantic approach is an efficient way to teach prepositions as well as phrasal verbs and idioms.The whole article consists of six chapters.Chapter One is the general introduction. The importance of learning English prepositions as well as an overview of cognitive semantics is provided. Then the objectives and significance of this research are presented. The organization of this dissertation is also provided in this chapter.In Chapter Two, the past studies of semantics and prepositions have been reviewed. The past semantic studies include the Referential Theory, the Ideational Theory, the Truth -Value Theory, the Use Theory, the Behaviorist Theory, the Theory of Situation, the Structural Internalism Theory and the Mental Internalism Theory. Although all these theories explain "the meaning of meaning" from their own perspective, none of them has ever taken experience and human cognition into consideration. Therefore, none of them has revealed the essence of the internal connections between meanings. Moreover, past studies on prepositions, such as Cooper (1968) & Leech (1969), Herskovits (1986) and Rauh's (1991) studies have also been reviewed and criticized in this chapter.Chapter Three focuses on cognitive semantics, cognitive metaphor and the cognitive studies on prepositions as opposed to the past studies. Cognitive semantics is a study of the relation between the words or expressions of a language and a conceptual structure. Cognitive semantics studies can be carried out with many approaches; the main approach this dissertation adopts is cognitive metaphorical approach. According to cognitive linguists, metaphor is an important means whereby more abstract, intangible domains of experience can be conceptualized in terms of what is more concrete and more immediate. The main characteristics held by metaphor are systematicity, coherence and asymmetry. Meaning can be extended by the metaphorical process. The cognitive study on prepositions begins with the study of spatial concepts. The relationship between spatial concepts and prepositions is explored afterwards. The cognitive studies on prepositions by Brugman (1981), Lakoff (1987), Langacker (1987), Taylor (1995, 2002) and Tyler & Evans (2003) are reviewed in the final part of Chapter Three.Chapter Four is on the analysis of over. The protomeaning of over is determined first. After that the other spatial meanings are identified by means of the full specification of path, trajector and landmark with the image schemas presented. Then the spatial meanings are categorized into five groups with reference to the relationship between the trajector and landmark. Finally, the metaphorical extensions of over are also provided.Chapter Five is the application of the cognitive semantic approach to teaching students over. An experiment is carried out to test the efficiency of the cognitive semantic approach. The subjects of the experiment are 46 sophomores whose major is not English. These subjects are divided into two groups with 23 subjects in each group. Firstly, the meanings of over are taught to two groups with the traditional approach and the cognitive semantic approach respectively. Then a quiz is given to each group the next day. Data collected after the quiz shows that there is great difference between the acquisitions of over by the two groups. Group B, the experiment group, performs much better which means that cognitive semantic approach is an efficient way to the teaching of prepositions.Chapter Six draws the conclusion of the current study.