| Cognitive linguistics began to emerge in the 1970s and has been increasingly influential since the 1980s. By now a vast amount of research has been generated under the name of cognitive linguistics devoted to various linguistic fields, such as semantics, syntax, morphology etc.In the field of SLA, an increasing number of linguists have recognized that cognitive linguistics could provide a powerful and reliable framework for SLA researches, mostly because of its unique quality of combining linguistic phenomena with psychological factors. The cognitive approach to SLA mainly concerns the underlying psychological mechanisms of L2 learners and general cognitive processes of language users. Among the research scope of SLA, the acquisition of English prepositions has always been a hot topic. Cognitive linguistics generally adopts a polysemy view to explore the multiple meanings of English spatial prepositions. Among others, Tyler and Evans (2003) suggest that the distinct but related senses associated with a linguistic form, spatial preposition in particular, constitute a semantic network organized with respect to a primary sense. And the various meanings associated with spatial prepositions are related in systematic and highly motivated ways. Accordingly they develop an insightful framework of English prepositions, termed Principled Polysemy Model.However, there are quite few studies devoted to Chinese EFL Learners'acquisition of semantic networks of English spatial prepositions from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Thus the present study the current study will make some contributions to this area.Specifically speaking, on the foundation of cognitive linguistics and within the framework of Principled Polysemy Model, the present study carried out an investigation of the acquisition of the semantic network of the English spatial preposition over by Chinese EFL Learners. The subjects are 35 undergraduate English majors and 35 postgraduate English majors from Foreign Language Department of OUC, and 15 English native speakers from Britain. At first a pilot study was conducted to work out the semantic network of the English preposition over, based on Principled Polysemy Model. Then two instruments, Free Sentence-Generation task and Prototypicality-Judgement Task, were taken to conduct the experiment among the subjects. All the data collected were processed with SPSS 13.0. The major findings are summarized as follows.1. Chinese EFL Learners, in spite of their different L2 proficiency levels, significantly differed from English native speakers in judging the prototypicality of the semantic network of the spatial preposition over.2. The performance of the Chinese EFL Learners with higher L2 proficiency did not converge towards the native speakers'norms of prototypicality. That is to say, the advanced Chinese EFL Learners did not perform more like the native speakers than the intermediate learners in judging prototypicality of the semantic networks of the spatial preposition over.3. In contrast with the native speakers, neither group of the Chinese EFL Learners, in spite of their different proficiency levels, could produce all the sentences containing all the distinct senses of the preposition over.4. The prototypical senses of over were used better than the peripheral ones. And there was a significant correlation between the prototypicality of the distinct senses of over assigned by Chinese EFL Learners and their performance in using the senses.The present study ends up with some constructive pedagogical suggestions and prospects for future studies, which will be useful reference for Chinese English teaching and related studies of SLA. |
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