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The Spatial Metaphorical Extension Study Of On - Based On A Corpus Study

Posted on:2012-05-02Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:L X DingFull Text:PDF
GTID:2215330338464990Subject:English Language and Literature
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Polysemy has become an important issue in the current cognitive linguistic study. Such a language phenomenon is drawing more and more linguists'attention.Cognitive linguists hold a different perspective and research method on polysemy phenomenon from most of other linguists. Lakoff has put forward his radial category theory in the study of polysemy preposition phenomenon. Through interacting with a set of cognitive principles, distinct senses derive from the protoscene of a preposition; thus non-spatial (metaphorical) domains derive from the spatial domain of a preposition.Two basic theoretical notions, conceptual metaphor and image schemas, are explained thoroughly to conduct the present study. The British National Corpus (BNC) will be adopted to get objective and sufficient data. By collecting and analyzing the data, the frequency of the original spatial meanings of on and its metaphorical extensions will be compared to prove that people's languages are fundamentally metaphorical. Finally, the spatial metaphorical extensions of on are classified. For each of the categories typical examples will be selected from the data and further explanations will be followed.By means of analysis, the present research shows that metaphor is pervasive in people's life, not only in language, but also in thought and action. It verifies the fact that the protoscene of on has a strong ability to extend itself to physical and abstract domains in a highly principled way and the process of extending is unevenly.
Keywords/Search Tags:cognitive linguistics, spatial metaphor, image schema, TR-LM theory, metaphorical extension
PDF Full Text Request
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