| The earliest study of metaphor is termed as a rhetoric method of metaphor and limited to certain fields like literature. In the 1970s, many scholars found the cognitive nature of metaphor. The philosophical grounding for the cognitive approach is experiential realism.The focus of conceptual metaphor is spatial metaphor because spatial experience is the most common experience in human life. Spatial metaphor are image-schematic and they can be reasoned and analyzed with parameters:trajector, landmark and path. Of all the researches,’OVER’attracts most attention, however, the previous studies are mainly focus on the categorization and meaning chains, while the metaphorical meanings are rarely mentioned and insufficient.The paper looks closely into the semantic network of the polysemy OVER from the cognitive linguistic perspective with the help of AntConc based on MNC. This study is mainly focused on what the relations are between the various distinct senses in the semantic network of OVER and what working principle of meaning extension is as well as how it works in the discourse of maritime English news. Image schema and conceptual integration theories are employed to define and analyze the polysemy’s spatial senses and how the spatial senses are extended into distinct non-spatial senses.By the quantitative and qualitative analysis, this study well demonstrates that during the process of semantic extensions of the polysemic OVER from the central sense in the space domain to the relatively marginal ones in the non-space target domains in maritime English to discover the features of distribution in maritime English.The findings of the study imply that the metaphors cannot be regarded purely a figure of language, Image schema and conceptual integration theories can be used to explain the metaphorical extensions of polysemy. The results may be helpful to the teaching of maritime English and general English as well as compilation of dictionary lexicography. |
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