On Polysemy Of English Prepositions Under The Cognitive Framework

One word may just have only one meaning at the beginning of being first used,but the new thing, the new thought，the new understanding and the new concept willemerge unceasingly along with the social development. Therefore, it is necessary forhuman beings to endow the old words with the new meanings in order to satisfy peoples’own needs for expressing the objective world. In one sense, the process of semanticchange of a word can be considered as the process of the word’s polysemy coming intobeing. Therefore, polysemy refers to the association of two or more related senses witha single linguistic form. English prepositional polysemy has always been a heated topicin linguistics. Among these researches, there are two camps that can be divided: thetraditional linguists and the cognitive ones.Traditional linguists have studied the phenomenon of polysemy, but there aremany limitations on their researches. They only study the semantic extension from theperspective of the inner language system itself, neglecting the relationships between theinternal system of the language and outside world of it, and neglecting the cognitionprocess of human being to the language.The traditional linguists believe that varioussenses of a preposition are isolated or arbitrary and they just describe the meanings ofthe preposition mainly based on its functions according to the sentence. Another way isto give cases where senses are either narrowed or expanded. Lexicon is considered as anarbitrary where senses are unrelated. Under such kind of theoretical framework, thephenomenon of prepositional polysemy is reduced to homonymy, let alone thediscussion of how the various senses are related with each other. As a consequence, thetraditional studies on polysemy can’t reveal the nature of prepositional semanticextension.During1970s, the prototypical categorization and conceptual metaphor graduallyplay an important role in the study of prepositional semantic extension along with thespringing up and development of cognitive linguistics. Cognitive linguists believe thatthe human language comes from human beings’ cognitive structure. They hold the viewthat various senses of a word are treated as related with one another through bothexperiential ways and cognitive ones. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the humanity’s cognitive structure in order to study the phenomenon of prepositionalpolysemy. From a cognitive perspective, a semantic category of a given word iscomposed by many various entries, in which the central meaning of the word isconsidered as the prototypical sense, and then the primary sense extends outwards, andfinally extends into other various marginal senses along with the use, cognition anddevelopment of language. These intimately related senses constitute the semanticnetwork of the word extension.The research in this paper will deal with the semantic extension of Englishprepositions by taking the preposition with as an example, and analyze the polysemy ofit under the framework of the cognitive linguistics according to the theoreticalfoundation of prototypical categorization and image schema, and then constitute thepolysemous network of the preposition with through the analysis of its semanticcognition mechanism---spatial metaphor.This thesis argues that the fertile senses associated with the preposition with arerelated to one another in a systematic and motivated way. Due to the development oflanguage, the analysis of the prototypical sense of the preposition with can be dividedinto two periods: the Old English Period and the Middle English Period. This papermainly has discussed the semantic extension of the primary sense “togetherness” whichwas established the central position as the prototypical sense in the semantic network ofpreposition with during the Middle English Period. This research also has summarizedtwo spatial senses:“co-participant” and “accompany” which are extended from theprototypical sense “togetherness”. Many other various metaphorical senses originatefrom these basic spatial senses.The human ability of conceptualization has endowed the meanings of language.Based on the assumption above, this thesis discusses that the preposition with extendsits meaning under the three cognitive principles: image schema modifications,metaphorical extension. Image schemas are an important form of conceptual structure inthe cognitive semantics literature. They are an important cognitive mechanism in thesemantic extension and provide the root for the metaphorical extension. Spatialmeanings are produced from the basic image schema and different spatialtrajectory-landmark relationship. Metaphors are an integral part of humancategorization: a basic way of organizing our thoughts about the world. Therefore,non-spatial or metaphorical meanings are developed through the metaphorical mappingfrom spatial domains to abstract domains. Additionally, the phenomenon of metonymycan not be neglected in the semantic extension. The research into the preposition with inthesis discloses the regularity of the extended meaning from the spatial to the non-spatial.The significance of this research mainly includes two aspects in the following:First, though many scholars have made the detailed study of the prepositionalpolysemy from the cognitive perspective, there are little researchers who have madereasonable explanation for its semantic network due to the reason that the prepositionwith is one of the most difficult prepositions which have multifarious senses andprevious studies just have made description or generalization of its various senses.Secondly, this paper deals with the polysemy of the preposition with under thecognitive point of view, and the process of semantic extension further confirms that thetransformation of the prototypical image schema and the metaphorical mapping can beimportant and perfect explanatory basis for the phenomenon of the prepositionalpolysemy.