A Cognitive Approach To The Semantic Construction Of Spatial Prepositions And Its Implications For Their Translation

Prepositions (include spatial prepositions) made their way into researchers'view as early as the era of traditional grammar. Scholars of that time maintain that through being combined with a noun or an element functionally equivalent to a noun, prepositions, in the form of noun phrase, serve as a relation-conveying linguistic form. Preoccupied with such a view, traditional grammarians describe and analyze the diversity of the usage of prepositions based on the various collocations or occasions where they appear. There are also some studies which sort out the prepositional usage according to such categories as time, locale, causal relationship and means. Overall, the researches that traditional grammar conducts on prepositions are confined within summarizing and pigeonholing their usage. Being limited in number and functional in nature, prepositions, in the spirit of structuralism, possess no lexical meaning as lexical words do. The formalism-based transformational-generative grammar has all along placed syntax at its heart at the expense of tarnishing the importance of semantics. Since the research on semantics is, at its best, satellite to that of syntax, systematic discussions about (spatial) prepositions can, a fortiori, not be expected to be found.Cognitive linguistics, established in 1980s, with its philosophical bases and views on language different from both structuralism and transformational-generative grammar, has shed fresh light on language research from a cognitive perspective. It is a new and meaning-centered linguistic school as well as research method. According to cognitive linguistics, human beings, equipped with a certain neuro-anatomical configuration, come to acquire a number of image schemas in their interaction with the physical environment where they dwell. Being the cognitive bases of semantic construction, image schemas are of tremendous significance to human language. In cognitive linguistics, image schemas, derived from human experiences and understanding, are recurrent and skeletal organizational structures linking abstract relationship with concrete images and making sense of new knowledge. More complicated concepts are understood in terms of these image schemas (Zhao Yanfang, 2001: 68). Through metaphorically projecting the image-schematic structure from the specific physical domain (source domain) to a wide range of non-physical domains (target domains), the semantic extension and various abstract senses of a spatial preposition thus come into being.Within the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics, this research is designed to study the semantic construction of spatial prepositions from the cognitive approach and its implications for their translation. Concerning the translation of spatial prepositions, some fresh and unique views on them and specific translation methods have been proposed by domestic scholars. Examples are conversion (Feng Li, 2003; He Xiaowei, 1995), omission (Yu Yanhong, 2005; Yang Xicun, 2000), amplification (Guan Zhe, 1998; Tian Qifei, 2005), etc. In the views of cognitive linguistics, two obvious flaws haunting traditional researches on the translation of spatial prepositions can be identified: (1) most of them are merely a summarization of the translation skills based on translators'own experiences, and are heavily tainted with subjective preferences, therefore, a consensus has still failed to be achieved in this respect; (2) due to the lack of a complete and systematic theoretical foundation, conventional studies on the translation of spatial prepositions can hardly be acclaimed as scientific, and the role they play in guiding the translation practice is ostensibly limited too. In addition,"the nature of translation lies in the interlingual transformation of meaning."(Liu Miqing, 1999) This weighty view seems not to have been fully reflected in traditional translation techniques for spatial prepositions.One of the tenets of cognitive linguistics is that language is the product of the organization of the world-related experiences by human cognition with which the semantic construction is tightly associated. Spatial prepositions, as a crucial component of language, are also cognitively motivated in the view of cognitive linguistics. Based on this, we conclude that to build the translation study of spatial prepositions on the cognitive nature of spatial prepositions and on the bases of the cognitive mechanism of spatial prepositions'semantic construction, namely, to make it cognition-oriented, would better reflect the nature of language, render the theoretical bases of this research more solid and provide more effective guidance for the translation practice.The specific research questions include: (1) what are the cognitive bases of spatial prepositions? (2) What is the cognitive mechanism of the semantic construction of spatial prepositions? (3) What implications can be drawn from the cognitive interpretation of the meanings of spatial prepositions for the translation of them?This thesis, by adopting the trajector-landmark theory initiated by the cognitive linguist Langacker in analyzing the cognitive bases of spatial prepositions and the cognitive mechanism of their semantic construction, proposes two strategies for the translation of spatial prepositions in the light of the nature of translation, i.e.: equivalent instantiation and adaptation of the trajector-landmark relationship. Parenthetically, we also touch upon the implications of the semantic analyses of spatial prepositions on a cognitive ground and the translation strategies put forth on the basis of these analyses for English teaching.