The Image Schema Analysis And Semantic Extension Of The Preposition BEYOND

This paper adheres to embodied philosophy and combines linguistics with philosophy, cognitive science and psychology. It starts with image schema and ends with semantic category by means of conceptual metaphor and the conceptual meaning is the main object. This paper underlines objective reality’s crucial role in language. Meanwhile, it also emphasizes human’s subjective initiative in language, describing the whole process that how the preposition BEYOND emerged and how its meanings expanded with the forms of semantic category and meaning chain. Its aim is to restore the philosophic and cognitive experience behind the process and reveal the root of BEYOND’s meanings. This research aims to highlight the humanity of linguistics, because linguistics is a kind of thinking sciences that stems from the interaction between subject and object. At the same time, it also have certain reference significance in second language teaching and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.On the basis of relevant theories and methods of cognitive linguistics, the paper’s examples come from partial British and American literature from 14 th century to 20 th century and the BYU--BNC corpus. The main research methods are experience, statistic analysis, induction and deduction. Firstly, the main three image schemas of BEYOND must be summarized. Secondly, the image schemas can deduct from nature domain to non-nature domain by metaphor mechanism. Then the prototypical sememe can be inducted according to the statistical data above.This paper consists of five chapters. The first chapter is the introductions about the sources of research,sources of corpus and the purpose,meaning and methods of this research. The second chapter mainly introduces the cognitive analysis of orientation prepositions at home and abroad, and makes a brief forecast of the research trends and directions. The third chapter firstly introduces the relationship between space and image schema along with “TPL schema” and “SPG schema”;then it inducts the “TPL(direction) schema” that is the basic image schema of BEYOND by combining the “TPL schema” and “SPG schema”; finally,it will analyze the three branches of “TPL(direction) schema” carefully.The forth chapter firstly briefly introduces the cognitive semantics and defines the meanings of BEYOND clearly by putting them into the conceptual frame “beyond+noun”. Then on the basis of conceptual metaphor theory, it will analyze the transformation between schemas before the semantic extension,the conceptual metaphor during the semantic extension, and the semantic category after semantic extension, which will form a complete sequence of semantic expansion. The whole paper is summarized in fifth chapter from two angles of view of philosophy and language, and the deficiency of this article is pointed out.