A Study Of Spatial Metaphor Of Prepositions At And In Based On Blended Space Theory

Metaphor was traditionally viewed as a set of extraordinary figurative expressions and the study on it was confined mostly to literature and rhetoric. In 1970s'many scholars started to realize the cognitive nature of metaphor. Cognitive linguists claim that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical and the way we view the world and the way we think is a matter of metaphor to a certain degree. Thus, as a core concept of human concept system, metaphor plays an important role in the way people think and view the world. Since space experience is one of the most common senses in human life, people are likely to give a non-spatial concept a spatial orientation. Therefore, spatial metaphor comes into being when the metaphorical mappings are projected from spatial orientation to non-spatial domain.Many scholars have employed different theories to explain metaphor, however, this paper regards metaphor as a kind of blended space, and tries to analyze it under Blended Space Theory put forward by Fauconnier. It focuses on the basic English prepositions"at"and"in"and their extended senses in different domains so as to study the new blended space from the combination between their grammatical spatial input l1 and another space input l2. In order to realize the goal of this paper, at first the author selects typical example sentences with prepositions"at"and"in"from the corpus, and then classifies them into different domains according to their extended non-spatial domains so as to figure out the metaphorical senses in the new space of the two prepositions. By comparing the different metaphorical meanings of them, the author concludes that: (1) The two prepositions"at"and"in"extend the spatial concept to many metaphorical senses around their basic spatial sense; (2) As the process of blending does not definitely rely on concrete spaces but people's mental spaces, people can blend the spaces arbitrarily according to their experience and cognitive ability; (3) Through the analysis of the grammatical spatial sense of the two prepositions"at"and"in"and the reason for why they can be blended with their metaphorical senses, we can conclude that Blended Space Theory enable the metaphorical sense to happen in the new blend space. Therefore, Blended Space Theory is worth studying further in order to explain more and more metaphorical phenomena.