A Cognitive Study Of The Semantic Contrast Between English Preposition In And Chinese Prepositional Phrase "Zai...Li"("?......?")

Based on image schema theory of cognitive linguistics,this thesis explores and and analyzes the similarities and differences of English spatial preposition In and Chinese prepositional phrase Zai...Li on their semantic extension mechanism.The present research adopts a qualitative method with contrastive analysis method to conduct the cognitive semantic analysis.The examples of In are mainly from BNC(British National Corpus),and all the Chinese examples are from CCL(Corpus designed by Center for Chinese Linguistics of Peking University).Besides,Babel Parallel Corpus and English-Chinese Parallel Corpus(designed by Lu Wei)contributes to the contrastive study.The research selects separately about 2000 sentences of In and Zai...Li to observe,analyzing their image schema,and classifying their senses into spatial senses and metaphorical senses.Homogeneity and heterogeneity of them are analyzed and found.The research findings are as follows.Firstly,apart from their same basic image schema,both In and Zai...Li have non-canonical schemas,that is,the landmark is not three-dimensional.The image schemas of both In and Zai...Li have properties of containment,surrounding and constraint;when the trajector is motional,image schema can have a property of dynamics.Secondly,in spatial sense,In carries more senses than Zai...Li,for it is also endowed with four other types of schema,namely,embedding schema,coverage schema,sunken schema and composition schema apart from the sharing properties with that in Zai...Li.Thirdly,in metaphorical sense,In also carries more senses than Zai...Li.Through metaphorical mapping of image schema,they both map to time,scope,situation,emotion,state,atmosphere and qualification domains.But in contrast with Zai...Li,the metaphorical sense of In is relatively more extensible,for it also generates means sense,relation sense,purpose sense,attribute sense,outcome sense and media sense.Additionally,Zai...Li just has an amongst sense which In doesn't have.This thesis reveals homogeneity and heterogeneity of In and Zai...Li by description and analysis of image schema.Accordingly,similarities and differences of people's cognition of spatial concepts are found.The thesis proves that semantic extension is motivated and the meanings of words are related.This study is hopefully to have implications for English language teaching,Chinese teaching as a foreign language,translation practice and bilingual lexicography.