The Acquisition Of English Spatial Prepositional Semantics By Chinese EFL Learners

It is widely recognized that preposition learning presents one of the hardest problems for EFL learners. For example, they often produce sentences like There is some water in the bottle, There is a book on the desk, There is a hole on the shirt, There is a crack on the jar, etc. Among the four examples, the uses of in and on in the first two sentences are correct, while the last two uses do not conform to English spatial categorization conventions. Why some uses of spatial prepositions are easier for EFL learners while others are more difficult and more challenging? What are the underlying factors constraining EFL learners' performance?The above problems were approached through a comparative study of the spatial semantics of three English prepositions in, on, over and their Chinese counterparts in light of the spatial categorization theory. The comparison revealed that the three prepositions differ from each other in that they describe different bundles of spatial relations that belong to three spatial categories. Meanwhile they also share spatial features with one another as well as with other neighboring English prepositions such as beside, through and above. Another important finding from the comparative study is that there also exist spatial categorization commonalities and disparities across English and Chinese. Specifically, the semantic members of an English spatial category that share features with the core members of a neighboring category are often classified into a different category in Chinese. Conversely, the semantic members of an English spatial category that do not share features with the core members of the adjacent category tend to fall under a corresponding category in Chinese. The former kind of semantic member...