A Cogntive Approach To Polysemous English Spatial Prepositions And Its Pedagogic Implications

Polysemy, "the association of two or more related senses with a single linguistic form" (Taylor 1956:99) is ubiquitous in natural language and therefore deserves the linguists'attention. It has long been observed that words take on different senses in different contexts.There were quite a few research schools about polysemy in the history, who proposed different ideas from each other. Structuralists proposed that linguistic signs consist of "significant" (form) and signified (meaning) and their relationship is arbitrary. They regarded the phenomenon that one form has more than two related meanings as obvious case of homonymy rather than polysemy. While generative theorists, take Pustejovsky (1993,1995) as an example, who developed a generative theory of polysemy, the theory which intends to describe the systematic aspects of polysemy patterns using generative rules, concentrate on the form and their studies had a tendency to be biased to syntax, thus abstract phenomenon such as word meanings are ignored in their framework. They assume that "a unique set of necessary and sufficient conditions exhaustively determine the meaning of a word" (Cuyckens & Zawada 1997:242).Cognitive linguistics breaks the shackles of traditional linguistics, re-understanding semantics and polysemy from the perspective of human cognitive process. Their explanation for polysemy is:the multiple senses of a specific word are interrelated, that is, with the typical meaning of a word (the original meaning or basic meaning) as the center, other extension meanings arise through image schema transformation and metaphorical mapping. And cognitive linguists have also shown that metaphor and metonymy are powerful cognitive tools for our conceptualization of abstract categories (Ungerer & Schmid,2001).The proliferation of spatial words has been an interest of many linguists. It is one of the difficult parts in language learning, especially for the figurative senses of polysemous words. Many polysemous lexical items occur more frequently in their derived figurative senses than in their original literal senses (Low,1988).To make the analysis objective and reliable, the data taken into consideration are from the frequently used prepositions ON, ABOVE and OVER in college English which have always been students'barrier as well as teachers' headache. I will make use of prototype theory to figure out their respective core meanings, and then with the aid of the cognitive mechanisms of image schema transformations and metaphor mapping, extended meanings are emerging. According to the characteristics of the semantic structures of prepositions inferred from the cognitive analysis of the prepositions ON, ABOVE and OVER, this thesis suggests the prototypical method, the semantic network method, the imagery strategy and the object method for the teaching of prepositions.