Spatial Metaphor And Implications For Prepositions Learning

Metaphor was traditionally viewed as a set of extraordinary figurative expressions and the study on it was confined mostly to literature and rhetoric for almost2000years. The20th century was a very important dividing period for metaphor. Many scholars put forward different metaphor theories tring to explain metaphor from new perspectives. Among them, Richards and Black propose the Interaction theory in the1930’s which break the traditional concept of metaphor. It first mentioned that metaphor is a part of cognition. After the1970’s, with the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s celebrated work Metaphor We Live By, more and more scholars began to study metaphor from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. When the western academic world set off a rush to study metaphor from cognition, Chinese scholars still take metaphor as a figure of speech. However, it’s worth noting that in recent years more and more Chinese scholars have translated and introduced the academic achievements abroad to Chinese learners. Meanwhile, some scholars have achieved great merits in the field.Lakoff and Johnson claim human conceptual system is largely metaphorical and the way we view the world and the way we think is a matter of metaphor. Metaphorical thinking is the road one must take for human beings to know about things and establish conceptual system. Basically, the birth of metaphor is because a certain amount of words can not express numberless thoughts. In order to form complete sentences with limited words, words have to map to other domains. Thus, every word has prototype meanings, and by taking the cognitive approach, metaphor can be regarded as a mapping tool from the prototypical source domain to the target domains, thus form new extended metaphorical meanings. Lakoff and Johnson also state that human physical experience constitutes the very basis of other abstract thoughts. Since space experience is one of the most common physical experiences in human life, people are likely to take spatial concept as the prototype concept which can be mapped to other abstract domain to form metaphor meanings.The present study will focus on the spatial metaphor and the metaphorical mapping from spatial domain to non-spatial domains. And through explaining spatial meaning and non-spatial meanings, prototype theory and metaphor extension will be applied into English teaching in class. Specifically, the author will take preposition in as an example to analyze. The reasons to choose preposition are as follows:first, although labeled as a small category of word with limited numbers, prepositions present a very difficult problem for second language learners, each preposition tend to have a variety of senses. Second, it seems that the fertile senses have no relations one another. In order to ease the study of prepositions, the researcher attempts to launch an experiment to help.The whole experiment consists of a questionnaire, a pre-test and a post-test, and involves85non-English major freshmen to form a control group and an experiment group. Through the experiment, the research attempts to answer the following questions:1. Compared with traditional teaching method, whether metaphor teaching can promote the learning of preposition in?2. Can metaphor teaching contribute to the long-term memory of preposition in?3. Can metaphor awareness be used to deduce new senses of a preposition?4. Whether metaphor teaching is limited to certain preposition in or can be expanded to other prepositions?After the experiment, all these questions will be answered, and some pedagogical implications will be draw from the results. Teaching and learning prepositions from the perspective of metaphor will promote learning process, and it will benefit long-term memory too. Acquiring metaphor awareness can help to guess the new meanings of a learned preposition. It is also true that metaphorical feature is not limited to the example preposition in, it fit for most of the prepositions.