A Cognitive Approach To The Polysemic Network Of In

Spatial prepositional polysemy has always been a heated topic in linguistics, and findings based on cognitive linguistics have injected fresh energy into this old field.Traditional linguists focus their attention mainly on the function of prepositions in relation to other word classes on sentence level, and come to the conclusion that mental lexicon is just an arbitrary list of lexemes and their senses are context dependent. In contrast, cognitive linguists put emphasis on the inter-relationship of the many senses of spatial prepositions. They believe that there exists a proto-scene of each preposition from which the primary sense of this preposition is formed and around the primary sense, distinct senses are extended triggered by various mechanisms. All those senses form a highly motivated and radial polysemy network within which senses have family resemblance with each other. With the methodology of principled polysemy advocated by Tyler and Evans, this thesis makes an attempt to explore the polysemy network of another English spatial preposition in, in the hope of finding the experiential basis and semantic motivation or sense formation and extension of the spatial preposition by virtue of the relevant theories such as prototype, image schema, metonymy and metaphor, etc. It intends to prove with the case study of the spatial preposition in that sense formation and extension of a spatial preposition are not arbitrary but motivated, and it is also the result of human cognitive categorization and conceptualization. Most spatial prepositions have their own semantic networks exhibiting prototypical effect.