English Prepositions: A Cognitive Analysis And The Implication For Teaching

English prepositions belong to such an important category of grammar that they have attracted the attention of linguists long before Cognitive Linguistics came into being. However, traditional linguists just take a descriptive method toward the meanings of prepositions. Their description does not contain a well-structured and comprehensive analysis of the meanings of prepositions.Cognitive Linguistics is a scientific approach to language, which is based on the theory of Prototypes and Basic-level Categories. It emphasizes the study of polysemy as one of its major topics. More importantly, it has made achievements in the exploration of the semantics of prepositions.Based on the contributions of Cognitive Linguists, this thesis is to make a case study in the cognitive analysis of the meanings of prepositions. According to the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), the preposition IN is the sixth in the list of the first fifty frequent used-words in the seven famous corpus and the fifth in the CLEC (桂诗春,杨惠中,2003:26). However, the study into it is less profound in this field. Then, the preposition IN is chosen as the objective of this study.Within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, this thesis makes a detailed analysis of the meanings of the preposition IN. It is advocated in this thesis that the distinct senses associated with the preposition IN are related to each other in a systematic and motivated way.Langacker (1987:376) has proposed the linguistic criteria for adducing theprototypical sense. Judging by these criteria, this thesis proposes that the center, or the prototypical sense of the preposition IN is the locative sense of Being Within A Bounded Space. After examining the extension of the senses of IN, it is found that the noncentral senses are derived from the prototypical sense directly or indirectly. It is further proved that metaphor and the transformation of image schemas are basic means of the semantic extension of prepositions. More importantly, the thesis proposes that metonymy is another important means of semantic extension for prepositions. This has been neglected by most Cognitive Linguists. The entire semantic structure of IN appears to be a radial network, in which the distinct senses are constructed around the prototypical sense and interrelated by family resemblances.According to the characteristics of the semantic structures of prepositions inferred from the cognitive analysis of the preposition IN, this thesis provides the semantic methods, the imagery strategy and the object method for the teaching of prepositions. All of the methods are supported by the findings of Cognitive Psychology. The teaching of IN has also been demonstrated to present the application of these methods, which includes four progressive processes: (i) the presentation of the prototypical sense of a preposition; (ii) the clarification of the senses in the contrast sets of prepositions; (iii) the explanation of the metaphorical and metonymical extension of senses; and (iv) the demonstration of the semantic network. These processes will help the students form a comprehensive understanding of the meanings of prepositions.In addition, to make the analysis objective and reliable, the data taken into consideration are from the authoritative corpus, such as Oxford English Dictionary (1989), Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995), Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (New edition) (2000) and Chinese Learner English Corpus (2003).This thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the thesis. Chapter 2 sketches out the theoretical framework for the analysis of prepositions. Chapter 3 presents a cognitive analysis of the preposition IN, figures out its semantic network, and summarizes the characteristics of the semantic structures of prepositions. Chapter 4 applies the cognitive analysis of prepositions to the teaching of prepositions. Chapter 5 is a conclusion.