A Study Of The Spatial Meanings And Metaphorical Extensions Of Prepositions In And Out

Metaphor has always been the subject studied by linguists and rhetoricians. In 1970s some scholars found the cognitive nature of metaphors and claimed that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical and the way we view the world and the way we think is very much a matter of metaphor. From then on, metaphor is viewed as a mapping from the source domain to the target domain which is almost abstract such as time,reason and result etc. Since all of our actions take place in space, so the most basic domain in cognitive systems is the space domain. Spatial metaphor will take its shape when spatial relations are mapped onto non-spatial concepts. Meanwhile, spatial metaphors are image-schematic and they can be reasoned and analyzed with the necessary parameters: trajector, landmark and path.This thesis aims to analyze a pair of prepositions in and out in English within the framework of cognitive linguistics to reveal the logical relationship between their spatial meanings and spatial metaphors extended in cognitive style. To find out how in and out conceptualize other abstract domains, the instances of in and out are collected from the researcher-self-built corpus. Then they are classified into six categories according to the different target domains, and the distributions of each preposition with metaphorical meanings in every domain are computed and analyzed. The major findings demonstrate that the two prepositions in and out develop metaphorical meanings in different target domains respectively: situation, manner, target, time, logical relation, and social relationship for in and situation, time, logical relation, source, degree and range for out.Among the domains, the spatial concept of in has a high potential in metaphorical extensions and is used frequently to conceptualize the abstract domains. This conclusion is mainly based on two findings of the present study. One is the higher frequency of metaphorical extensions out of the total number of the instances with the preposition in in the statistics; the other is that it develops metaphorical extensions mainly in six widely-used domains. Meanwhile, in the six target domains where the meaning of in develops metaphorically, situation is the most active one. The wider distribution of in in the domains of manner, target and time than that in the domains of logical relation and social relationship suggest that people are more inclined to conceptualize the former four abstract domains by means of the spatial concept of in.The preposition out has a comparative low potential in metaphorical extensions and it develops most of the metaphorical extensions in the domain of situation too. The other three active target domains of metaphorical meanings of out are logical relation, degree and range. Time and source are relatively less used as target domains in the metaphorical extensions of out. This thesis provides evidence of metaphorical extensions of the prepositions through a quantitative analysis with the help of a qualitative analysis to reveal the systematic correspondence of mappings of the spatial meanings of in and out to their image-schematic concepts. It also reinforces the importance of image-schematic structure to the shaping and reasoning of spatial metaphors, which may offer some data helpful for foreign language teaching and dictionary compilation.