A Cognitive Study Of Spatial Words

As a pervasive semantic phenomenon across languages,polysemy has been given a systematic and extensive study,but there is not much attention shown to spatial polysemous words. This thesis is a study of the spatial words carried out within the framework of cognitive linguistics which sees the different senses of a polysemous item are related by means of image schema transformation and metaphorical mapping. Describing spatial words by image schema offers a good way for the differentiation of similar spatial words,while analysis on the metaphorically extended meanings will make different senses get associated in a more systematic way.This thesis analyzes three pairs of spatial words from a cognitive view. Image schema transformation motivates the meaning extension from the central meaning to other spatial meanings,which in turn are mapped onto quantity,state and social domains by conceptual metaphor. Thus spatial words hold different but related meanings within different cognitive domains. The result proves the proposal of this thesis:there is relatedness among different senses of a polysemous word. This way to analyze polysemy undoubtedly offers a new perspective to deal with polysemy in language teaching and learning. In this thesis,there is also a comparative study between spatial equivalents in Chinese and English,and the result shows that language usage is closely connected with the social,cultural and psychological foundation,and people understand metaphorically extended meanings by way of cognitive association in different contexts.