An Analysis On Meanings Of English Prepositions On And Over From The Perspective Of Trajector-Landmark-Path

Space is one of the basic and necessary definitions to construe and comprehend entities.Any objective entity must be involved in the dimension of some space and several or more spatial relations.Those entities involved in the objective world can be understood and construed actively through human's own initiative.It is because of the distinct comprehensions and grasps to the related definitions,different localities,and complicated relationships that humans express themselves by lots of tangle-some prepositions in different situations.Here the thesis mainly aims to analyze the semantic systems of English prepositions from image schema,two easily confused spatial prepositions ON and OVER as study case.Concerning cognitive linguistics,it utilizes theories from cognitive linguistics including image schema and related theories to organize the research and makes a comparison between the two words ON and OVER in spacial meanings respectively.It attempts to find out answers to these questions:(1)What are the prototypical meanings of the prepositions ON and OVER and what are the basic prototypical schema in the space domain?(2)What are the target domains involved in the extended meanings of preposition ON and OVER,is there any difference between the domains of the two words?(3)In what way does the features exist between them concerning the trajector-landmark-path schema?Cognitive linguistics reveals that the process from spacial definition to abstract definitions involves in linguistic special metaphors.It is an revelation of image schema,among which Trajector,Landmark and Path are very important parameters to give an expressive analysis to spacial meanings of preposition ON and OVER(Langacker,1987;2004).According to the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis on the basis of a self-made corpus,it puts forward both the prototypical and extended special schema of preposition ON and OVER,and compares the schema of them in spacial and extended domains,which deepens the distinctive features and the understanding on both spacial and metaphorical spacial meanings of ON and OVER.Taking prototypical meanings of Preposition ON "in or into a position covering,touching or forming part of a surface"(from Oxford Dictionary for Advanced Learners,2008)into consideration,preposition ON pays emphasis to attachment between two entities with touching tendency in schema.Even in dynamic relations it does not make movable path or track with specific direction prominent.However,it is different from preposition OVER.Preposition OVER possesses plenty of usages both static and dynamic.And it emphasizes "covering" and"direction" in basic schema.Meanings of spatial prepositions ON an OVER exists in many target domains besides space,there are others including time,manner,scope etc.some of these semantic extensions are not arbitrary,but affiliated with prototypical schema of the prepositions.Then it makes an analysis in the detailed distributions of the two prepositions on the basis of a self-made corpus as well.Through the semantic structure analysis of prepositions ON and OVER,it can be understood that differences really exist between the two special preposition ON and OVER concerning the usual schema.And it shows us more concrete and comprehensive understanding about how spacial definitions are extended to metaphorical definitions.Studies on preposition semantic structures make great contributions to both second language and foreign language learning and teaching.