A Study Of Teaching Of English Prepositions In The Prospective Of Conceptual Metaphor

In1980, the publication of Metaphors We Live By written by Lakoff and Johnson has established the status of metaphor. They state metaphor is everywhere, not only in our language, but also in our thoughts and actions as well. Essentially, metaphor is considered as a mapping from source domain to target domain, whose philosophical basis is experiential realism. Experientialism emphasizes human cognition originates from our bodily experience and daily life experience.As functional words, prepositions play an essential role in English. They are rich in meaning and its complexity and flexibility in collaboration makes it become a difficulty in English teaching. In numerous kinds of tests, prepositions become an essential part. Traditional linguistics agrees rich meanings and complex collaboration of prepositions are arbitrary and idiomatic. Traditional grammar believes complex meanings of prepositions and verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, etc. are all habitual, whereas it neglects internal relationship among meanings themselves. Therefore, it is little effective under guide of the concept, however, cognitive linguists hold metaphor can effectively illustrate internal relationship among meanings of prepositions. While, many researches are focused on theoretical level and neglect their application in teaching. Hence, the research tries to apply metaphor to teaching in order to assist students acquire prepositions better.The research will choose to analyze typical semantic of prepositions—in, on and under with the help of image schema and prototype theory on the basis of conceptual metaphor, in order to cultivate students’metaphorical awareness by prepositional semantic network, in addition, use Krashen’s "Natural Order Hypothesis" to illustrate teaching of English prepositions in the light of cognitive linguistics’study complying with second language acquisition theory.When students learning prepositions, they can start with studying proto-meaning or spatial meanings, under the guide of Natural Order, and then extend to metaphorical meanings or non-spatial meanings. In view of this, we are able to construct semantic networks so that each sense can be closely related through radial network, in this way, prepositional senses mastered maybe clear and easy to be remembered as well to fan out from point to area. Moreover, by analysis on in, on and under of semantic structure and uses and research on conceptual metaphor, it may be found in practical teaching, developing metaphorical awareness is helpful for learning in prepositions even vocabulary.Indeed, it must be acknowledged that there are some limitations in the research, the author carries out a qualitative research, but the conclusion is just a hypothesis, which needs the necessary teaching practice to prove.