A Cognitive Study Of Spatial Preposition In On Spatial And Metaphorically Extended Meaning In English And Chinese Language

Spatial prepositions,the most fundamental prepositions derived from human beings'interaction with the outside physical world, provide the basic foundations and best thinking patterns for the abstract senses, thus winning the favor of more researchers. As people of all the nations live on the same earth, share similar physical environments and common bodily experiences, it is reasonable to share the similarities with each other represented by spatial preposition across different languages. However, due to the divergent social environments, cultural backgrounds, historical customs of different nations, the usages of English spatial prepositions are quite different from those of Chinese. Many learners complain that it is difficult to grasp the meanings and usages of spatial prepositions. Especially, English-Chinese spatial preposition translation, in which mistakes often take place, is receiving more and more research attention. Many scholars have conducted plentiful research into English-Chinese spatial preposition translation, yet their studies are limited to summarizing translation skills and contrast of their formal difference. They ignore the underlying cause of semantic equivalence and semantic conversion on English-Chinese spatial preposition translation, and usages of spatial prepositions in English and Chinese language remain to be a mystery.With the framework of cognitive linguistics, this study, based mainly on the image schema theory and trajector-landmark distinction, focuses on the spatial and metaphorically extended meaning of the spatial preposition IN in attempt to explore the deep causes for semantic equivalence and conversion on English-Chinese spatial preposition translation.This thesis is written on the English spatial prepositional IN phrases selected from COCA (The Corpus of Contemporary American English). In this study, 400 English spatial prepositional IN phrases are collected and then classified in accordance with English spatial preposition IN and their Chinese counterparts.The study shows that the image schema plays a key role in the semantic equivalence and conversion of English-Chinese spatial preposition IN translation, which is actually the image schema matching process. The image schema match processes can be divided into two categories: the first category is the image schema match on spatial meaning, which consists two sub-categories, namely image schema match without change and with change. Specifically, the image schema match without change about container schema includes both container schema for static and dynamic whereas the image schema match with change which can be separated into schema for static UP, dynamic UP, static DOWN and CONTACT about the Chinese version. The second category is the image schema match on metaphorically extended meaning, which could be also further divided into image schema without change and with change, and more special image schema match with word conversion and spatial preposition omission about the Chinese version.The findings of the study could contribute to the study and application of the cognitive linguistic theory. The image schema matching process in the thesis will probably help students and translators to understand English-Chinese spatial preposition translation more deeply so that they can avoid the incorrect and improper translations.