The Semantic Network And Acquisition Of English Prepositions At, On And In

Polysemy has become an important issue in the current linguistic study. Analyzing polysemy phenomenon from a cognitive perspective has attracted a special attention from many linguists.Traditionally, most of linguists argued that mental lexicon is an arbitrary list of lexemes, while cognitive linguists take a different perspective on the nature of polysemy. Lakoff (1987) put forward his radial category theory in the study of polysemy phenomenon. Anderson (1983) raised his influential semantic network theory to elaborate the internal mechanism of human to store and process knowledge. Tyler and Evans (2001) brought the cognitive approach to a new stage. Basing on the prototype theory, they built a highly motivated polysemy network of prepositional polysemy in which distinct senses derive from the prototypical sense through interacting with a set of cognitive principles. This cognitive principle mainly refers to spatial metaphor and image-schema transformation. Different senses relate to each other and thus form various meaning chains in the network.Considering the polysemy feature of prepositions, this thesis aims to build the semantic networks of English prepositions at, on and in employing the above theories as the framework. The present study is to explore the relationship between the systematic spatial metaphor and preposition acquisition. Meanwhile, it attempts to find out to what degree the cognition to the semantic networks affects the acquisition of prepositions at, on and in. In all, the research tries to find out the answers to the following three questions:First, do the Chinese EFL learners acquire each of the three English prepositions at, on, and in following a relatively fixed order in terms of the target domains mapped onto from the spatial source domain? If yes, what is it?Second, what factors influence the Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of English prepositions at, on and in?Third, what is the effect on the Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of English...