| Under the framework of cognitive linguistics metaphor is regarded as the cognitive tool for people to recognize the world by using the common expressions to explain the abstract notions. Spatial metaphor is a way people use basic spatial concepts to understand many unfamiliar things. Spatial concepts exist since the human beings exist in the world. They exist in people's daily language to express various spatial senses and abstract senses, which play important roles in understanding the world. Spatial metaphor is a mapping from spatial concepts to other target domains. It is fundamental for people to recognize the abstract notions. The present paper takes the spatial word ON as an example to explore its spatial senses and metaphorical extensions by using theories in cognitive linguistics. ON is taken as a category with a prototypical sense and many peripheral marginal senses. The aim is to analyze how the spatial senses map to its metaphorical extensions to reveal the regularity of human beings cognition and to form a systematic understanding of the semantic structure of ON.Data for the study are collected from the British National Corpus (BNC) and some English dictionaries.300 sentences as the raw data are chosen from the on-line service of BNC. After analyzing the raw data 398 instances are identified as the valid data. There are three kinds of spatial senses:static contact, static noncontact and dynamic sense. Three spatial senses are related to each other through image transformations. The central sense extends to the peripheral senses. The metaphorical extensions are classified into six domains:the domain of target, state, time, scope, basis and manner. The distributions of these six domains are not equally balanced. The study adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods to provide strong evidence for spatial senses and metaphorical extensions. Metaphor mappings and image schema transformations play important roles in explaining the relations of various senses of a word.
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