A Corpus-based Study On The Spatial Metaphors Of "ON" And "OFF"

Spatial concepts in people’s language express different abstract senses.A pair of spatial words on and off is frequently used in daily life.The focus of spatial metaphors is spatial words since spatial words are directly derived from everyday spatial experience.This thesis aims to analyze the pair of spatial words on and off based on the cognitive linguistic theories of image schema,Langacker’s trajector and landmark theory,conceptual metaphor and metaphorical mapping.From 586 valid instances of on and 521 valid instances of off in OANC,spatial domains and non-spatial domains of on and off are discussed qualitatively and quantitatively with the help of AntConc and dictionaries.Therefore,spatial senses and metaphorical extensions are analyzed in this paper.The result shows that in general,the metaphor is widely used in everyday expression and the metaphorical extensions of spatial words are transformed from their spatial senses through metaphorical mapping.The comparison of on and off proves that the asymmetry feature exists in this pair of spatial words.They have opposite central spatial senses.On is frequently used in spatial senses while off is widely used in metaphorical senses.Although the distribution and classification of target domains of metaphorical senses are different,metaphorical senses are frequently used in everyday life,which has implications for English learning and teaching of these spatial words.