A Cognitive Study On The Non-spatial Meanings Of Spatial Prepositions

Cognitive linguistics, psychology, and philosophy have long observed the importance of spatial relation and spatial experience in humans'cognitive activities. Spatial preposition is an important subset of prepositions in English, and the meaning extension of spatial prepositions from spatial meanings to non-spatial meanings is a result of humans'experiential and cognitive activities.This dissertation is particularly concerned with the non-spatial meanings of spatial prepositions. In previous studies on the non-spatial meanings of spatial prepositions, Conceptual Metaphor Theory was taken as the most important theory to explain the relationship between spatial and non-spatial meanings of prepositions in cognitive linguistics, and the non-spatial meaning of spatial preposition is a kind of mapping from spatial domain to non-spatial domain. However, the metaphorical interpretation of the space/non-space analogy still faces some problems, since some non-spatial meanings of spatial prepositions couldn't be explained explicitly only by Conceptual Metaphor Theory. For instance, over and under, is a typical set of opposites or antonyms of spatial prepositions, while their non-spatial meanings are not simply opposite to each other. The non-spatial meanings s exhibited by under are less extensive than those of over. It is hard to explain why the preposition over could exhibit a preference sense, while under do not exhibit an un-preference sense. And the prepositions in, on and at encode a'state'sense respectively, but a unified conceptual metaphor STATES ARE LOCATIONS couldn't explain the differences of distinct'state' senses.Due to the inadequacy of Conceptual Metaphor Theory in the explanation of meaning extension of spatial prepositions from spatial meanings to non-spatial meanings, this dissertation studies the non-spatial meanings of prepositions over, under and in, on, at by the notion of'experiential correlation'explored by Joseph Grady (1997), which argued that experiencing regular and motivated correlations of events and scenarios in the real world motivates the integration of such regularities into language. For instance, associations between concepts of quantity and vertical elevation, between concepts of importance and size are reflected in languages. Through the study, we have found that the emergence and extension of non-spatial meaning shared by spatial prepositions are surely influenced by humans'cognitive method and are closely related to our daily experience, while pragmatic strengthening plays a role in it as well. In conclusion, compared with'conceptual metaphor'proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, 'experiential correlation'has given a better way to explain the meaning extension of spatial prepositions from spatial meanings to non-spatial meanings, the case study in this dissertation has proved this point as well. We hope this study would be helpful to the teaching and relevant studies of English prepositions in the future.