A Cognitive Semantic Study Of Preposition On-Based On A Comparison With Chinese Prepositional Phrase Zai......Shang

Traditionally, the meanings of words in general, especially the meanings of spatial prepositions, have been defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. However, within the cognitive paradigm, the category of prepositions is a kind of conceptualization of relations between entities. With the cognitive paradigm as the theoretical background, this research holds that cognitive linguistics offers a more reasonable explanation for the polysemy of prepositions than traditional approaches. For cognitive semanticists,the phenomenon of polysemy is contributed to the principle of the metaphorical mapping of image schemas, which are systematically organized and rooted in recurring bodily experiences and interactions in the world. Polysemous categories exhibit a number of more or less discrete, though related meanings, clustering in a family resemblance category.Cognitive linguists have made great achievement in the study of spatial prepositions, among which over has been the most thoroughly discussed one. Comparatively speaking, the preposition on is much ignored by cognitive semanticists, despite the fact that it is among the first spatial prepositions to be acquired by very young children and enjoyed a higher frequency of usage than over. A cognitive analysis of spatial prepositions in China is mainly based on foreign works and contrastive study is mostly about spatial concepts. In other words, there is no distinction of the part of speech of spatial words when a contrastive study is carried out. To the author's knowledge, there is still no cognitive exploration on the semantic comparison of on and zai...shang, while the foreign study of this field has focused on the spatial usage of prepositions.The present research adopts a qualitative and quantitative approach to conduct the cognitive semantic analysis of spatial preposition on, together with a comparison with the Chinese prepositional phrase zai...shang. Altogether 1000 samples with preposition on are selected randomly from BNC (British National Corpus). Typical examples are selected and classified into spatial senses and metaphorical senses, which are further classified into clusters respectively. As a result, the senses of on in the spatial domain and metaphorical domain can be summarized as contact schema, support schema, pressure schema, constraint schema and path schema. These image schemas themselves are related to each other in systematic ways that reflect speakers'experiences in the particular environment where they live.The analysis of on reflects the fact that senses of a polysemy are not randomly distributed, but related in a non-trivial way. A cross-linguistic comparison of two similar terms in two remote languages will be convincing for arguing that the prepositional usage is systematic. Therefore, the research further makes a cross-linguistic comparison of English on and Chinese zai…shang with an aim to uncover image-schematic motivations for the similarities and differences that can be tracked down. Hence another corpus is used in this research. The samples of zai...shang are taken from CCLC (Corpus designed by Center for Chinese Linguistics of Peking University) and those with frequency of more than 100 are chosen as the analysis subjects for the research. A similar way of classification is adopted and Chinese zai…shang generally falls into the clusters of contact schema, support schema, above schema, verticality schema and path schema.Consequently, on and zai...shang are similar in that both of them can show contact schema, support schema and path schema. On mainly denotes the relationship in which there is contact between landmark and trajector, while zai...shang covers more usage than that and can also express the situation when there is no contact between the trajector and the landmark. Therefore, zai...shang can also employ above schema and verticality schema. As to these two schemas, the usage of zai....shang is similar to above and over. But there is no obvious evidence to show that zai...shang denotes pressure schema and constraint schema, as expressed by the usages of on. It can be concluded from the analysis that there are both similarities and differences in the meaning distribution of on and zai...shang. For each word, the meaning relatedness exists at first among different spatial senses and then with abstract senses. Their similarity in usage reflects similar ways of cognition among people of different cultures.The dissertation explores the meaning distribution of spatial preposition on and builds the model of its meaning relatedness by employing the terms in cognitive semantics. The result of the present study offers a possibility for the comparison between the meaning distributions of two similar terms in two remote languages, Chinese and English. Furthermore, it proves that cognitive theory can also be used to explain Chinese language phenomena. The findings of this study offer evidence for the possible existence of a universal spatial metaphorical system as predicted by cognitive linguists. Moreover, to study lexical items in terms of the cognitive relationship of trajector and landmark can help solve the problem concerned with the ambiguity of polysemy and offer a new way for the differentiation of synonymy. In practice, it sheds lights on learning and teaching of vocabulary in the way of building relatedness among senses. It is also suggestive for the dictionary compilers that the order of the meanings can be presented in a better way by considering the relatedness among senses.