A Cognitive Study On Spatial Prepositions From The Perspective Of Image-schema Theory

The thesis studies the primary senses and the sense extensions of spatial prepositions,the image schemas of the primary senses and the image schemas of the sense extensions by selecting samples from COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English)under the theoretical foundation of the four basic image schemas.The thesis,at first,classifies spatial prepositions into four categories as Cheng Benfan proposes,each category does or does not have subcategories,and the thesis selects the most frequent spatial prepositions in each category or subcategory by COCA.According to the searching result,the thesis eventually selects ten spatial prepositions,the common-used spatial prepositions in the thesis,as the research objects.Then the thesis randomly picks out 30 samples of each the most frequent spatial preposition from COCA,totally 300 samples.The thesis studies primary senses of the most frequent prepositions according to the contexts of 300 samples,then draws corresponding image schemas.Moreover,the thesis studies sense extensions of the most frequent spatial prepositions from the context of 300 samples and draws image schemas of the sense extensions.At last,the thesis analyzes the relationship between the image schemas of the primary senses and the image schemas of the sense extensions of spatial prepositions.Hence,the thesis studies on two questions: First,What are the primary senses and the sense extensions of spatial prepositions? Second,What are the image schemas of the primary senses and the image schemas of the sense extensions of spatial prepositions?After the study,the conclusions of the thesis are: First,the primary senses of the common-used spatial prepositions are studied by analyzing samples from 300 samplesrandomly selected from COCA,and the sense extensions of the common-used spatial prepositions are the primary senses under abstract contexts.Second,Both the image schemas of the primary senses and the image schemas of the sense extensions of spatial prepositions are drawn as the four basic image schemas.