A Cognitive Approach To Metaphorical Extension Of The Spatial Preposition IN

Traditionally, metaphor is viewed as a set of extraordinary figurative expressions, i.e. as more or less ornamental devices used in literary and rhetorical style. However, since the 1970s, many researchers found the cognitive nature of metaphors. The publication of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (1980) has established the status of metaphor in cognition. They (1980:3) state that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but also in thought and action. In their view, frequently used metaphorical expressions are evidence of concepts underlying our everyday understanding of events and experiences.According to 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 which considers bodily experience and daily life experience as the source of human cognition. 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 FRONT. When the spatial relation is mapped into the non-spatial concept, spatial metaphor comes into being.Spatial metaphors are a kind of image-schematic metaphors of high degree of cognitive indispensability (Lakoff & Turner 1989:99-100). Spatial metaphors can be reasoned and analyzed with the parameters trajector, landmark and path. According to the theory of image schematic metaphor, when spatial metaphors map the image-schematic structures of spatial domains onto non-spatial abstract domains, the spatial logic of the image Schemas is preserved during the process and becomes abstract logic in the non-spatial target domains. Therefore people are able to conceptualize the non-spatial concepts by way of the spatial ones.The spatial metaphor is one of the most active sub-branches within the cognitive framework. A variety of studies have been carried out by many researchers in China and abroad to reveal the pervasiveness and the importance of spatial metaphors in different languages and cultures (Hill 1982; Talmy 1983; Lakoff 1987; Cuyckens 1993; Cook 1996; Grabowski & Weiss 1996; Lan 1999; Wu & Wang 2001; Cui 2002). Many researchers have studied spatial metaphors based on the study of some specific words such as UP/DOWN, (A)ROUND, OVER. However, only a few studies are found in the area, which have discussed spatial metaphors of the preposition IN and how its spatial concept is mapped into non-spatial domains, which urges the present research (Clark 1973; Schulze 1993; Brugman 1998; Yule 2002; Tao 1998, 2001; Li 2000; Yu 2002; Lan 2003).Previous researches on metaphor have laid a theoretical foundation for the present study which intends to investigate how the spatial metaphors of the preposition IN are used in human conceptualization of the abstract domains. Firstly, the instances with the preposition IN are collected from the researcher' self-built corpus which is made up of two bestseller novels. The software ConcApp is used to search for and collect data for analysis. Among the 3628 instances of the preposition IN collected and analyzed, there are 2373 instances with metaphorical extensions, which is about 65.41 % of the total.Then according to Langacker's (1987) linguistic criteria for adducing the prototypical sense and by using the authoritative dictionaries such as Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition) (1989), Collins Cobuild English Dictionary (2000), Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961), this thesis proposes that the prototypical sense of the preposition IN is the locative sense of Being Within A Bounded Space and gives its prototypical image schema as well.Through a detailed study of the metaphorical senses of the preposition IN within the framework of cognitive linguistics, we found that different dimensions of metaphor are formed during the process of extension. We also found that the dimensions of metaphor are dependent upon the distance from the prototypical spatial meanings of the preposition to its metaphorical meanings. The three dimensions of the metaphorical meanings that the spatial meaning of the preposition IN is extended into include the basic dimension of metaphor which is made up of such metaphorical meanings of four target domains: DIRECTIONS, BODY PARTS, ENVIRONMENT and MEDIA; the high dimension of metaphor refers to those adverbial, prepositional and conjunctional phrases with the preposition IN; the mid-dimension of metaphor occupies the largest part of the metaphorical meanings the spatial meaning of the preposition IN is extended into, which includes seven target domains: TIME, STATE, MANNER, FIELD, EVENT, PURPOSE and GROUP.The major findings demonstrate that the metaphorical meanings the preposition IN develops are distributed unevenly not only in the three dimensions of metaphor but also in their different target domains. By exploring further the cognitive process of the metaphorical extensions of the preposition IN, it is proved that based on the prototypical spatial meaning of the preposition IN and by way of image schema transformation and metaphorical mapping, the three dimensions of metaphor and their target domains form a semantic radial network, into which physical space as the nuclear is extended. More importantly, the thesis proposes that in this radial network, the distinct senses of the preposition IN appears to be interrelated by family resemblances.Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis, this thesis demonstrates that during the process of metaphorical mappings of the preposition IN into the different target domains, there is a systematic correspondence between the image-schematic concept and the metaphorical meanings of the preposition IN, which provides evidence of metaphorical extensions of the prepositions and reinforces the importance of image-schematic structure to the shaping and reasoning of spatial metaphors. Meanwhile the study verifies the principle of polysemy from a cognitive perspective: the different meanings of polysemy are related by way of image schema transformation and metaphorical mapping. The study also reinforces the claim that metaphor is not just a matter of language but a figure of thought in nature. Human cognition plays a crucial role in the process of linguistic construction. It may offer some data helpful in foreign language teaching and lexicography.