A Cognitive Approach To The Polysemous Meanings Of In,On And At

Cognitive linguistics bloomed in 1980s and has appealed great attention since then.Compared with previous linguistic schools,Philology,Historical Comparative Linguistics,Structural Linguistics,Functional Linguistics,Transformational Generative Linguistics,the biggest feature of it is to focus on the meaning of words.There are many theories under the category of cognitive linguistics that have strong explanation force on the field of meaning study,such as,metaphor theory,metonymy theory,image scheme and classical prototypical theory.Every theory plays its own role with its particular features.What is on doubt is that the research of polysemy also focuses on meaning.As a result,it is reasonable and essential to make a combination of cognitive linguistics and polysemy research.Employed three spatial prepositions in,on and at,this thesis gives analyses of prototypical meaning of three prepositions draws their prototypical image schemes based on spatial domain.Under such foundation,the usages of them on domain of time,situation,manner and logical relation have been presented with the instruction of metaphor theory.A summary of the similarities and differences of the three prepositions has threaded among the analyses.This thesis starts from the spatial domain of prepositions which is the easiest part for understanding,and extends to the domain of time,manner,situation and logical relation by the instruction of metaphor theory.The significance of the study in prepositions acquisition is that the studying of prepositions in spatial domain can contribute to learners' understanding of meanings of prepositions.Meanwhile,it has demonstrated that image scheme and metaphor have profound force in the illustration of polysemy.The cognitive analyses of prepositions' meaning have provided a new way of understanding world an d language.