| This study was undertaken to investigate how frequently the preposition in is distributed in news discourse with regard to its spatial meanings and non-spatial meanings, and to examine what target domains are involved in the metaphorical mapping of the preposition in.The research questions to be addressed in the present study are as follows:1 What are the general frequency distributions of the preposition in used in news discourse with regard to the preposition's spatial meanings and non-spatial (metaphorical) meanings?2 What are the target domains involved in the metaphorical mappings of the preposition in and what's the frequency distribution of the preposition in each of the target domains?3 What's the general feature of those metaphorical mappings from the source domain to the target domain?The theoretical framework for this study is basically conceptual metaphors, the container metaphor, the prototype theory and image schema theory. The data for analysis in the present study is collected from news discourse in British National Corpus (BNC). The reason to choose news discourse as materials for analysis is that this kind of discourse is fundamentally narrative and depictive with a frequent use of prepositions, including in. In this sense, a study of the preposition in on the basis of this genre is more likely to achieve the desired results. The conclusions of the present study are as follows:First, in the sampled news discourse, a majority of the preposition in is used in its non-spatial senses, amounting to 66.59% of the total, while the percentage of the word used in its spatial meanings is only 33.41%. As news discourse closely relates to social life, such sharp contrast of proportions, to a certain extent, verifies the prevalence and pervasiveness of metaphor in people's everyday life and confirms Lakoff & Johnson's hypothesis that our language is fundamentally metaphorical.Second, the preposition in has two basic spatial senses: the prototypical within-a-volume sense and the less prototypical within-an-area sense. In the present study, the latter sense enjoys a much higher percentage than the former one. The reason is probably that choice of the preposition in its specific lexical meanings depends on the specific genres of the discourse. As news discourse mainly concerns happenings or events which occur in certain areas, this determines the much more frequent choices of the preposition in its within-an-area sense.Third, the spatial image of the preposition in is mainly mapped onto six target domains: Time, Scope, State, Manner, Events and Activities, which agrees with the number of target domains proposed by Lakoff & Jonson. The percentage of six target domains distributes rather unevenly. The domain of Time enjoys the highest position, with 28.20% of the total 305, followed by the domain of Scope (27.21%), the domain of State (14.75%), the domain of Manner (10.49%), the domain of Events (9.84%) and the domain of Activities (9.51%). Lakoff (1993: 245) claims that"metaphorical mappings vary in universality; some seem to be universal, others are widespread, and some seem to be culture specific". The present study confirms Lakoff's prediction that the target domain of Time is a strong candidate for metaphorical mapping (ibid).Fourth, the general feature of the metaphorical mapping is that all the metaphorical mappings are not accidental but are based on people's life experiences and their psychological associations; in other words, all the target domains involved are closely related to people's life, work and their mental feelings, and actually, people can not survive without such domains. Naturally, people are most likely to impose their in-out spatial orientation onto those domains, achieving metaphorical mapping from the source domain to target domains and generating various metaphorical meanings. Such mappings form the cognitive motivation of the meaning of this preposition and help to develop an interrelated semantic network of this word.The results of the study have strong pedagogical implications: First, the teaching of vocabulary should follow the cognitive nature of the intrinsic relationship between different meanings of a spatial preposition. Second, learners'awareness of learning English spatial prepositions from a cognitive perspective should be raised.The study is far from comprehensive, and it is limited in three ways: First, the data analyzed in the present study may be inadequate and insufficient. Second, though various senses of the preposition in are classified into different target domains according to different senses in the present study, the classification is only suggestive or subjective. Third, only the spatial preposition in has been investigated in the present study. More researches need to be carried out to investigate other prepositions. |
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