A Cognitive Semantic Study Of Sense Formation And Extension Of The English Spatial Preposition

From the perspective of cognitive semantics, this thesis, exemplified with over which is taken from Oxford Advanced Learner's English-Chinese Dictionary (6 ed.), analyzes the experiential basis and semantic motivation of sense formation and extension of the spatial preposition by virtue of the relevant theories such as prototype, image schema, metonymy and metaphor, etc. and arrives at a conclusion that sense formation and extension of a spatial preposition are not arbitrary but motivated. The sense extension gives birth to a radial network from the prototypical sense through less prototypical sense to the marginal sense, and it is also the result of human cognitive categorization and conceptualization. Most of spatial prepositions have their own semantic networks exhibiting prototypical effect.It would be better to say that a spatial preposition would trigger off a mental image schema in mind rather than say it has meanings itself. In our minds the spatial preposition has its own mental schema which can be turned into the visual schema. The basic image schema forms the primary sense of the spatial preposition. The image schema is composed of the trajector, the landmark and the path. When certain element(s) of the schema has been highlighted but not broken away from the framework of the basic image schema, the transformations are extended, so are the spatial senses which, by way of the metaphorical mapping from the concrete spatial domain to the abstract domain such as time, quantity and power, etc, extend a series of different but related metaphorical senses within different cognitive domains.To sum up, the sense formation and extension of the spatial preposition is motivated by the image schema, which also provides the root and prime power for metonymic and metaphorical extensions. The basic schema produces the primarysense, and around the primary sense, many other senses are extended and eventually they form a semantic category within which senses have family resemblance with each other and they are well-motivated.Based on the research findings, this thesis also explores its implication for sense representation in the learner's dictionary by putting forward a new model of Sense Representation of Bi-dimensional Plane, in which the prototype theory and image schema would be used in sense representation. Specifically speaking, firstly, the basic schema and its primary sense of a spatial preposition are drawn, and around them, the schema transformations and the corresponding senses are listed in a radial way. This kind of sense representation can distinguish it from the one-dimensional and one-directional sense arrangement in most present dictionaries and help people to learn the polysemous words very well.