| The study gives an analysis of College English phrasal verbs from the semantic cognitive perspective.An English phrasal verb is an idiomatic combination consisting of a verb and one or two particles. In College English, phrasal verb is one of the most active fundamental parts, and also is one of the difficult language points in the process of college students’ learning.This thesis takes ground on image schema and metaphorical extension theory. The following questions are addressed:1) What are the image schemas and metaphorical extensions of the particles through back, on and off. which are important in sense formation of phrasal verbs?2) Are there some semantic similarities among phrasal verbs in New College English? What are these semantic similarities?3) What is the cognitive semantic relationship between the particles and phrasal verbs? What is the role the particles play in forming new senses of phrasal verbs? Answers to these questions are illustrated in cases studies. The author firstly focuses on the particles through, buck, on and off,which are less investigated in previous studies, and are important in forming meanings of phrasal verbs. The study is carried out by phrasal verbs extracted from In-Class Readings of New College English books. The small scale corpus is carefully probed into in searching for their semantic cognitive features. According to their features, they are classified into five semantic clusters:separation clusters, completion cluster, centralization cluster, decreasing cluster and increasing cluster. Investigations of the effects on tendency senses by particles particle in phrasal verbs are given. Thus, three tendencies have been discovered: disengagement tendency, completion tendency and moving upward tendency.These research results are helpful to the further study of the application of English phrasal verbs and provide some references to College English phrasal verb teaching. Teachers can modify their teaching method and teaching materials according to the research results to help students to learn phrasal verbs effectively. |
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