Cognitive Perspective On Spatial Metaphor

Metaphor has attracted the attention of scholars interested in language for more than 2000 years. Traditionally, metaphor was viewed as a set of extraordinary figurative expressions. In the past few decades, however, the situation has undergone a radical change. The interest in metaphor and the study of its structure, mechanism, function, effect, and cognitive nature have grown rapidly in a broad range of disciplines: linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology and education. Rising in this change is the view that metaphor is not merely a matter of language, but a mode of thought and an effective cognitive tool for human to know abstract things in terms of concrete ones. Spatial metaphor, by which human gets to know the abstract in terms of spatial relations, plays a significant role in the development of human cognition.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One gives an overview to the history of the study of metaphor, especially the period in cognitive perspective. Richards, Black and Lakoff are specially presented, whose studies contribute much to clarify the cognitive mechanism of metaphor from the presentation of the Interaction theory, the issue of "radical creative hypothesis" and the mapping from the source domain to targetdomain. This chapter also demonstrates the significance of spatial metaphor and the reasons of taking preposition as the research objective of the thesis.The original sense of prepositions mainly belongs to spatial domain, and the spatial sense has a strong ability to extend itself to many abstract domains by way of spatial metaphor. The question to be answered is why and how a preposition could extend itself from spatial domain to abstract domains. Through the analysis of some prepositions, Chapter Two exposes the experiential grounding on which the extension occurs and its philosophical basis梕xperiential realism. The source, significance, varieties of experience and their relationship are also demonstrated in detail in this chapter.Image schema is described as relatively simple structures that constantly recur in our everyday bodily experience and in various orientations and relations. Chapter Three demonstrates that it is in terms of image schema that the extension occurs. Furthermore, this chapter provides a detailed analysis of image schema including its constitution, features and function, and its distinction from image.Chapter Four contributes to a case study of prepositions. First, ageneral analysis is made on the classification of prepositions in terms of spatial relations, on the character of spatial image schemas of prepositions and the extensions of spatial senses to many abstract domains. Then the author gives a detailed analysis to some particular examples of prepositions to attempt to prove these cognitive understanding and reasons feasible and reasonable.Chapter Five is the conclusion. It summarizes the previous chapters and points out the significance of the study in unveiling the nature and working principle of language, in English teaching and in lexicography. The broad prospect of study in other parts of speech besides preposition, on the basis of cognitive mechanism of spatial metaphor, will be definitely beneficial.