A Study Of The Spatial Meanings And Metaphorical Extensions Of The Word Under

Metaphor used to be viewed only as a rhetorical technique by scholars. But since 1980s, an increasing number of scholars tend to realize that metaphor should essentially be attributed to the cognitive category and our conceptual system to a large extent is metaphorical, and the way the human beings perceive and think is just the same. Hence, metaphor is viewed as a mapping from the source domains to the target domains which fundamentally are abstract, like those of time, reason and result, and so forth. The basic cognitive domain is the spatial one, because all of our activities are carried out in the space. Spatial metaphor is thus formed when we map the spatial relationships to the non-spatial concepts. As well, the spatial metaphor is taken as an image-schematic one, where spatial metaphors are analyzed and interpreted based on the necessary parameters:trajector, landmark and path.This thesis is targeted to analyze the polysemous word under based on the theories of conceptual metaphor, in order to figure out the inner relations between all the meanings discussed, and furthermore, build up the overall meaning network of the word under. Firstly, sentences involving under are picked out and gathered from two novels Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway; and then these sentences are sorted into spatial and non-spatial groups according to the target domains they fall into, after which the connections between the spatial meanings are explored, and the connections between non-spatial meanings and spatial ones are discussed, and consequently, the meaning network of the polysemous under is constructed. For the convenience of investigating spatial prepositions on the basis of the embodied experience, the orientation forms are reclassified into two sorts: the vertical ones and horizontal ones, and the latter one is further divided into front-back and left-right. Through interpreting and testifying the processes of mapping, based on the theory of embodied philosophy, the foundational relations and similarities between spatial and non-spatial meanings are closely examined, and the internal semantic system of spatial and non-spatial meanings are figured out.Through the study of spatial meanings of under in the two novels, the internal relations between spatial meanings are revealed, and the prototypical meaning is extracted, and the spatial meaning network is firstly established which consists of 5 spatial meanings. Then by means of analyzing the non-spatial meanings in the two novels 7 non-spatial meanings are sorted out, and the inner metaphorical connections are constructed between these non-spatial meanings and those 5 spatial ones, and thus the final semantic network of under is formed with a total of twelve meanings which is a relatively more complete and systematic meaning network of the word under. The meanings of this semantic network are as follows. First of all, this meaning network of under is more complete, thorough, and systematic in comparison with previous ones, and it offers a model for studies on other prepositions. Meanwhile, this thesis has also provided a powerful proof of the existence of metaphor in lexical meaning extensions, and as well demonstrated the effectiveness of image-schema in forming and illustrating metaphorical meanings. Moreover, this research improves the efficiency of learning the preposition under, and offers constructive suggestions to the organization of meaning items in dictionaries.