A Cognitive Study Of Through

Owing to the complexity and diversity of semantic meanings of prepositions,traditional linguistic theories consider that semantic meanings of prepositions are highlyarbitrary, and the emergence of any new semantic meanings is an accidental rather thaninevitable phenomenon. Cognitive linguistics provides new theoretical perspectives andresearch methods for the study of prepositions. And studies on prepositions make animportant component part of cognitive linguistic study. Through is one of the mostcommonly used prepositions, and it plays important roles in our daily communication.However, literature review shows that researchers have paid less attention to studies onthrough than on other prepositions such as, over, in and on. It is therefore obviouslyimperative to carry out more studies on through, so that we may have a comprehensive andin-depth understanding on the meaning of prepositions.Based on the framework of cognitive linguistics, this thesis applies qualitative methodto explore the meaning of through. This thesis tries to give answers to the followingquestions:1. What is the prototypical meaning of through?2. What cognitive domains the meaning of through is associated with?3. What is the cognitive mechanism of non-spatial meanings of through extended fromspatial meaning?Through the analysis of dictionary-based data and corpus-based data, and theapplication of prototype theory, image schema theory, and metaphor theory, the authordraws the following conclusions:1. The prototypical meaning of through is a spatial meaning that TR traverses abounded LM with an entrance point and an exit point. There are one static meaning andthree dynamic meanings of through in spatial domain. And the image schema of through isa SOURCE-PATH-GOAL schema.2. The meaning of through is associated with nine cognitive domains, i.e. spatial domains, temporal domain, domain of event, emotional domain, domain of manner, domainof cause and reason, domain of circumstance, sensory domain, and domain of quantityrespectively;3. Through is extended from its spatial meaning to non-spatial meanings throughmetaphorical mapping of different domains.This thesis consists of five component chapters.The first chapter of this thesis is an introduction. It introduces the background and thesignificance of the research and the corpus and data collection, and proposes the researchquestions.The second chapter is the literature review. It makes a brief review of previous studiesmade on prepositions both at home and abroad in detail, and previous studies made onthrough.The third chapter is the theoretical framework. It introduces two major cognitivetheories applied in this thesis: image schema theory and metaphor theory.The fourth chapter is the core part of this thesis. The author probes into theprototypical meaning of through with five criteria, and then with meanings in dictionariesand sentences in corpus, analyzes the spatial meaning of through, and last finds itsmetaphorical extensions in eight different domains.In the fifth chapter, a conclusion of the whole thesis is made, and major findings andlimitations of the study are pointed out.