A Corpus-based Study On The Cognitive Semantic Use Of "Through" In Chinese Non-English Majors' Compositions

Prepositions are difficult for EFL learners due to their frequent use,flexible collocation,and multiple meanings.There are two major types of studies of prepositions: analyzing the polysemy of prepositions based on cognitive linguistics,and investigating the use of prepositions based on corpora.However,studies that combine two approaches together are rather limited.Besides,compared with other frequently used prepositions,through gets much less attention.This thesis,therefore,combines cognitive linguistics and corpora to investigate the use of through in Chinese non-English majors' compositions.Drawing on Tyler and Evans' principled polysemy network,the thesis first analyzes the senses of through to find that through can be categorized into three groups: proto-scene,time scene,and metaphorical scene which can be further divided into seven metaphorical senses--the completion sense,the by-means-of sense,the cause sense,the throughout sense,the extended action sense,the conquering sense,and the limit sense.On the basis of through's polysemy network,the research adopts COCA and two sub-corpora of CLEC,ST3 and ST4,to examine the differences in the cognitive semantic use of through between Chinese non-English majors and native speakers.To do it,the retrieval software,Antconc 3.2.4,is used to sort out all the correspondent lines which are then labeled according to semantic meanings.Then the author calculates the occurrence,standard frequency,percentage,and values of Chi square to see if there exist any differences.The results show that compared with native speakers,Chinese non-English majors tend to underuse the proto-scene of through and overuse its metaphorical scene among which the by-the-means-of sense is used in a high frequency while others are used less or even never used.Further comparing the cognitive semantic use of through between different English proficiency students,the author finds that with English proficiency improving,the by-the-means-of sense is used less and other metaphorical senses more;however,the frequency of using the proto-scene is not improved.This exploration may serve as a worthy reference for teaching and learning the semantic senses of through and hopefully arouse the attention to the neglected polysemy of all prepositions.Besides,the findings are expected to make no less contribution to the future investigation of preposition polysemy.