| This research tends to study the spatial concepts of OVER and explore the dimensions of metaphorical extension of it, starting with a review of metaphor studies. The earliest study of metaphor is termed as the "Rhetorical Study of Metaphor" and the use of metaphor was then recognized as a departure from normal language. In the 1970s many scholars found the cognitive nature of metaphors, which started with the celebrated work of Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980). Metaphor is thus in principle a conceptual issue and regarded as a mapping from the source domain to the target domain. Many linguistic evidences suggest that metaphorical thinking arises from our bodily experiences in the world, reflecting the general regularity of cognitive process, id est., our cognitive stage moves from the known to the unknown, from the abstract to the concrete. At every stage of cognition, the acquired knowledge serves as a starting point to gain the new one. Human thought is thus a metaphorical process. The philosophical grounding for the cognitive approach is experiential realism.The focus of conceptual metaphor study is spatial metaphor because spatial experience is the most common one in human life. Spatial metaphor is defined by Lakoff and Johnson that "gives a concept a spatial orientation" (1980: 14). Spatial; metaphors are image-schematic and they can be reasoned and analyzed with parameters: trajector, landmark and path. The study of spatial metaphor traditionally chooses prepositions of locality as its main target. English prepositions are originally used for spatial reference, indicating spatial location and movement. Of all the researches, "OVER" attracts much attention for its sophisticated nature, for example, Taylor (1989), Tao (1997), Cheng (1995), Chen (1998), et cetera. However, the previous researches on prepositions of locality, especially "OVER" was primarily the study of categorization of prepositions, as well as the internal links bound as meaning chains, while the metaphorical meanings and extension of it were insufficient and under-researched.The present study is novel in the sense that it clearly discusses the cognitive mapping from the source domain to the target domain. Besides, a corpus-based study is also initiative and pioneering in analyzing metaphorical extension. The study addresses the questions as: How is OVER distributed in the domain of space? What are the target domains of the metaphorical extensions of OVER? And in what way are spatial concepts mapped onto the other non-spatial domains of concept? All the data are randomly collected through the British National Corpus (BNC), and the TR-LM paradigm of Langacker is applied to classify the metaphorical extension of OVER. The study shows "Over" has rich spatial meanings and can be categorized into four dimensions, id est., relative vertical position, pervasive meaning, arc passage and end of path, and spatial "Over" is mapped onto five non-spatial domains with the image schema preserved. The five domains are power and society, time, quantity, status and emotion and sense.This thesis provides evidence of metaphorical extensions of the locative through the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, reinforces the importance of image-schematic structure to the shaping of spatial metaphors and supports the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson that "Metaphors allow us to understand one domain of experience in terms of another" (1989: 135). This research evidences that there exists a systematic transference from spatial concepts to non-spatial concepts; this study also provides some data helpful for foreign language teaching and lexicography.
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