| People's study of metaphor can be traced back to Aristotle. He constantly mentioned the make-up and rhetoric function of metaphor in Rhetoric. He thought that metaphor was a language tool to express the same meaning by substituting one word for another and the two belongs to a comparative relationship. This theory had a profound influence on the study of metaphor in the western Rhetoric of the later two thousands years. Richards published his Philosophy of Rhetoric and put forward first the interaction theory of metaphor in the 1930s. From then on, a new age of cognitive study of metaphors came, especially in the 1980s when Lakoff and Johnson delivered their classical book Metaphor We live By. They say that metaphors are pervasive in our daily life, not only in language but also in thought and action. The general conceptual system we live by is metaphorical in nature. The thesis provides a deep and systematic study of the basic features of spatial metaphor.Based on the conceptual metaphor theory, metaphor is a very important channel for people to understand abstract concepts and think abstractly. With the cognitive approach to metaphor, people can comprehend those concepts without internal structure by virtue of more concrete structures and clearer concepts. The nature of metaphor is grounded on the material experiences of people's perceptions, motors, physical and social experiences about the world and one concept (a domain) is mapped unto another concept domain. The mapping is unidirectional, systematic and imperfect. Spatial metaphor is such a kind of metaphor. It takes the spatial concepts as the source domain and maps spatial concepts unto the cognition domain or target domain, and acquires an extension and abstract meaning;hence it makes up a cognitive process. It can not only get the abstract and unknown concepts familiar and known to people, but also evokes readers' imagination. Human body is the prototypeof spatial metaphor. Multi-dimensionalities become the basis of spatial metaphor mapping because of people's body and experiential experiences. People's primary cognition of the world begins with their body positions and movements in the surroundings. They express their cognition of the world by their spatial relationship of up-down, front-back, left-right, in-outside, high-low and central-peripheral and form various spatial concepts, thus describe the unseen and intangible abstract concepts like time, scope, state, quantity and social position.The thesis provides a contrastive study of basic features of different spatial metaphors in four aspects: schematic multi-dimensionalities, semantic connotation, systematicness and words creativity.Many image schematic metaphors derive from body in mind. The spatial concepts in the material world like length, height and width are transplanted unto abstract areas and form many multi-spatial metaphors. Therefore spatial metaphor is multi-dimensionalities.Spatial concepts like front-back, left-right, up-down and high-low are used to describe the colorful world.Spatial metaphor is not arbitrary and is grounded in our physical experiences and cognitive perceptions. "That boosted my spirits" means that that thing makes me excited. Its physical experiences are: bending position signifies sadness and standing position indicates happiness. Spatial metaphor is multi-dimensionalities. We understand one experience in terms of another. Different concepts are connected and mutually analogized from this to that, from known to unknown, from concrete to abstract and thus form a metaphorical cognition relationship. On the macro side, spatial metaphor is systematic externally and this relationship is represented on closeness between many spatial metaphors. On the micro side, it is systematic internally and the relationship is expressed on the exclusiveness andcomplementariness between two concepts. In addition, its systematicness is shown on the symmetric arrangements of spatial metaphors. Many spatial metaphors exploit the symmetric arrangements tacitly. Up-down, front-back, in-outside, high-low, deep-shallow are symmetrically arranged. Another basic feature of spatial metaphor is its tacit creativity. On one hand, this is closely connected with the ever-developing sciences and society. People are constantly developing, modifying and creating the world. This deepens our understanding of the world and inspires us to think and research the world in terms of fresh metaphors. On the other hand, it is closely related with the metaphor. The life of language lies in its powerful association. People associate it with more and more things with the help of metaphorical meaning.
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