A Cognitive Study Of Prepositions From The Perspective Of Spatial Metaphor

Metaphor has been the study focus of language scholars for more than 2000 years. It was traditionally viewed as a set of extraordinary figurative expressions and the study on it was confined mostly to literature and rhetoric. In the 1970s' some scholars began to study it from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. They 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 embodied philosophy. Since space experience is one of the most common experiences in human life, people are likely to give a non-spatial concept a spatial orientation, such as MORE IS UP and FUTURE IS IN FRONT. The present study will focus on the spatial metaphor, i.e. the metaphorical mapping from spatial orientation to non-spatial domain. Spatial metaphor is based on image-schema and can be reasoned and analyzed with the parameters like trajector, landmark and path.According to the spatial relations, preposition can be classified into four categories: location, position, direction and path. In this thesis, we mainly study the basic spatial relations and the metaphorical extensions of preposition. We choose three typical prepositions from four categories as our study subjects. Specifically, we collect IN, ON and OVER from the novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as the corpus to reveal how the three prepositions are used to conceptualize other abstract domains. Based on the discussion of metaphorical extension of the three prepositions in different target domains and the distribution of their metaphorical meanings in each domain, we come to the following conclusions: 1) the three prepositions IN, ON and OVER develop their metaphorical meanings in the target domains of situation, manner, target, time, logical relation and social relationship. 2) Preposition IN develops the most metaphorical extensions in the domain of situation; ON in the domain of target; OVER in the domains of manner and situation. 3) The spatial concept of IN has the highest potential in metaphorical extension. 4) There is a systematic correspondence between the image-schematic concepts and the metaphorical meanings of IN, ON and OVER.This thesis provides evidence of metaphorical extensions of preposition through a quantitative-qualitative analysis and reinforces the importance of image-schematic structure to the shaping and reasoning of spatial metaphors, which may offer some instructions for cognitive teaching and remain valuable for lexicography.