A Study Of Chinese EFL Students' Comprehension Of Spatial Prepositions AT, ON, IN From Cognitive Semantic Perspective

English prepositions are comparatively small in number, simple in form, but difficult to comprehend and use,and therefore they are one of the trickiest challenges for EFL learners, who even stumble over simple prepositions. Few, if not none, of EFL learners can achieve a native-like command of these prepositions.Traditional grammar treats English prepositions as meaningless function words, denoting location, time, possession, and so on. The componential analysis proposed by generative semanticists is also incompetent in dealing with prepositions. Semantics of prepositions thus has been long neglected. Take spatial prepositions at, on and in for example, they are conceived as being simply related to geometric concepts: point, surface or volume. The non-geometric relations encoded in these prepositions are not well explained. EFL teaching in this regard mainly resorts to drills and recitation, and its effectiveness is far from being satisfactory.Cognitive linguistics based on experiential realism has proposed that the conceptual system emerging from everyday human experience is the basis of natural language semantics. Since space pertains to a central and universal aspect of human experiences, it is conceived to be at the very heart of all conceptualization. Consequently spatial terms in language have become a special concern of cognitive linguists, who argue that concepts encoded in English spatial prepositions could be more appropriately structured in terms of image schema rather than a bundle of discrete semantic features. By means of image schema transformation based on experiential correlations, structures of concrete spatial domains are mapped onto that of other abstract domains. In this way, a chain of senses linked by family resemblances is set off and polysemy appears.After reviewing and evaluating various approaches to the study of spatial prepositions, the present study makes a cognitive semantic analysis of three typical spatial prepositions: at, on and in. An image schema, with trajector, landmark and path, was proposed for each preposition, and the senses of each preposition are accounted for in relation to the topological, force dynamic configurations of the image schema, and image schema transformations.Based on the cognitive semantic analysis of at, on and in, the author goes on to study Chinese EFL students'comprehension of the three prepositions. It is found that the effect of topology dominates over the effect of force dynamics on their comprehension of these terms. In light of the embodied view of language and the learning-acquisition distinction proposed by Krashen, the present study attributes the subjects'inadequate command of these prepositions mainly to the EFL teaching based on traditional semantic study of these prepositions. At the end of this thesis, this author suggests that the present TEFL situation could be improved by incorporating the findings of cognitive semantic study of spatial prepositions into classroom teaching.