An Analysis Of Preposition Errors In Senior High School Students’ English Compositions From The Perspective Of Talmy’s Cognitive Semantics

English prepositions play an important role in connecting sentences.According to Kennedy’s(1998)statistics: one preposition is about to appear in every eight words,no matter what style of the English discourse is.English prepositions are widely used in collocations and fixed phrases,which are difficult to learn for L2 learners.In this research,426 English compositions of senior two at Zhengzhou Experimental High School were selected as data.The preposition errors were sorted and analyzed in English compositions according to the actual situation of students’ preposition errors from the view of cognitive semantics.The purpose of this study is to identify preposition errors in senior high school students’ compositions to explore the types and the distribution of those errors from the perspective of Talmy’s cognitive semantics,meanwhile to analyze possible causes of such errors,in order to provide some references for teaching prepositions at senior high school.The study attempts to answer following questions:(1)What kinds of preposition errors in senior high school students’ compositions can be found from the perspective of Talmy’s cognitive semantics? What is the distribution of such preposition errors?(2)What are the possible causes of such preposition errors explained from the perspective of Talmy’s cognitive semantics?426 compositions are sampled and downloaded from Zhixue Website,when students took their regular monthly exam,mid-term exam and eight-school joint examinations.The sampling excludes missing answer sheets,un-uploaded ones,blank composition sheets and other cases.At the same time,the preposition errors are analyzed qualitatively,which undergoes data collection and analysis.The research shows that:(1)from the perspective of Talmy’s cognitive semantics,preposition errors in students’ English compositions at senior high school mainly include three types: degree of extension,fictive motion,and conflation.Most errors fall into the types of degree of extension and conflation,which suggests students’ problems in using temporal and spatial prepositions in collocations and in conjunction with some verbs.(2)The causes of such errors may result from students’ different cognitions of semantic and linguistic phenomena,which are mainly affected by intralingual and interlingual factors and so on.In addition,students are also vulnerable to make errors influenced by the dynamic cognitive bias of language.Affected by this,they are also prone to abuse and misuse prepositions containing the meaning of “to” vector.Finally,this study may be beneficial to English teachers in teaching.About the ways of teaching,the study provides some suggestions: teachers should pay attention to leave enough space for students’ perception and thinking in language learning.At the same time,teachers should also try to reduce the influence of intralingual and interlingual factors and other interference on students by putting prepositions in collocations to explain,establishing small corpora,supplementing corresponding semantic knowledge,or drawing image schemas and so on.Besides,the study also reminds teachers to attach importance to the teaching of prepositions and meanwhile helps students to reduce preposition errors in their compositions once they know the causes of errors in preposition uses.