A Research Of The Image Schema, Metaphorical Extensions And Trans-language Mapping Of "Over"

The research of polysemy dates back to early1980’s. Within the cognitiveframework, the study of polysemy, especially that of the spatial words, plays anessential role. The cognitive linguists hold the view that all entries of one word make upa semantic category, where the central meaning of a word is considered as aprotomeaning, and as language develops, the protomeaning extends to other senses.These closely interrelated senses make up the semantic network of a word.Image schema is one structure that results from human beings’ cognition acting onthe exterior world. The prototypical image schema gives birth to the protomeaning, andthe transformations among image schemas make the image-schema transformationscome into being. The image-schema transformations give birth to other spatial senses inspatial domain; a series of metaphorical senses are extended by the metaphoricalmapping from the spatial domain to other cognitive domains. In a word, image schemaplays a fundamental role in the generation and extension of spatial words’ senses. Therenowned scholar Li Fuyin proposes that image schema is the human beings’ commoncharacter and law of cognition. Human beings should study it from the viewpoint oftrans-language and trans-culture[1].This thesis intends to study the image schema, the metaphorical extensions andtrans-language mapping of over as a spatial word on the basis of the corpus in order toestablish the meaning chain and the semantic network of over. The language material inthis thesis is a corpus based on the English version A Dream of Red Mansions[2]translated by Yang Xianyi; therefore, over is put into a whole discourse to analyze,which solves the problem that the examples of over are randomly exemplified. Thevalid data of this thesis are1,408sentences from the established corpus. Five kinds ofspatial senses of over, among which a meaning chain exists, are analyzed and a morecomprehensive and complete semantic network of over is tried to be established. Afterthe quantitative and the qualitative analysis, this thesis confirms that, as a spatial word,over takes the spatial protomeaning as a core, and forms a semantic network in whichthe protomeaning extends outward by the transformations of the prototypical image schema and the metaphorical mapping to other cognitive fields.Following the research on the meanings of over in A Dream of Red Mansions, thisthesis tries to compare, analyze, classify and discuss the spatial word over in order tostudy the rules of trans-language mapping of image schema of over from the viewpointof translation, which is based on image-schema theory, setting both Cao Xueqin’s 《红楼梦》[2]and Yang Xianyi’s English version A Dream of Red Mansions[3]as theanalytical data. This thesis proves that Chinese-English translation not only hassomething to do with the transfer of meaning at the pragmatic level, but with cognitiveagreement and correspondence at the lexical level; at the same time, the process oftranslation is that of psychological analysis of the original version. The trans-languagemapping of image schema will be achieved under such circumstances.