A Comparative Study On Metaphorical Meanings Of English And Chinese Spatial Words Based On The Image Schema Theory

English words fall into two categories:content words and function words in terms of traditional English grammar.Prepositions belong to the latter.Generally speaking,they do not act as grammatical components in a sentence,and mainly play the role of connecting content words.And their meanings are not obvious.The number of prepositions is limited,but their usage frequency is quite high.In Chinese,there are spatial words similar to English prepositions,which can express spatial relations,such as SHANG(?),XIA(-?),ZUO(?),YOU(?),etc.Among them,SHANG and XIA are the main words to express spatial relations.Therefore,this type of words has become the focus of language study.The study of cognitive linguistics pays special attention to English and Chinese spatial words,which breaks people's traditional understanding of them.So far,there have been relatively few corpus-based approaches to studying the comparison of English and Chinese spatial words of UNDER and XIA,and OVER and SHANG.Based on the data collected from BNC and ToRCH2014 Corpus,this thesis aims to explore the metaphorical meaning distributions(hereinafter referred to as MMD)of OVER,UNDER,SHANG and XIA,and the similarities and differences between their metaphorical extension meanings by applying the image schema theory proposed by Langacker.This thesis attempts to answer the following questions:1.What are the metaphorical meaning distributions of OVER,UNDER,SHANG and XIA respectively?2.What are the similarities and differences between the metaphorical meanings of OVER and SHANG?3.What are the similarities and differences between the metaphorical meanings of UNDER and XIA?This thesis adopts a corpus-based approach and combines quantitative and qualitative analysis.4000 sentences containing OVER,UNDER,SHANG and XIA are selected randomly from English and Chinese corpora,with 1000 sentences for each word.Typical examples are kept and classified into different meaning relations respectively.As for the metaphorical meaning extensions of these four spatial words,all their spatial domains are mapped onto the abstract domains.For example,the social distance is a metaphorical extension of spatial distance,the abstract Covering relation is a metaphorical extension of the concrete one,the Quantity relation is a metaphorical extension of abstract spatial high-low relation,and the Time relation is a metaphorical extension of spatial FRONT-BACK relation,etc.Several findings are listed as follows:Firstly,for the metaphorical meaning distributions of OVER,the percentages of the Distance,Covering,Quantity,and Time relation are high,and there are a small number of relations of Horizontal movement,moving downward and Crossing movement.For the metaphorical meaning distributions of SHANG,the Point-Surface and Attaching relation are two main meaning relations.Covering relation accounts for a small part.The percentages of the Moving upward and Horizontal movement are low_Moreover,there are few Time and Quantity relation.For the meaning distributions of UNDER,the percentages of the Distance,Covering,and Quantity relation are high.Touching relation and Time relation account for only a few parts.For the meaning distributions of XIA,the Covering relation accounts for nearly a half,the Distance relation has a high percentage.Besides,the percentages of the Vertical movement,and the Quantity and Time relation are low.Secondly,the similarity between OVER and SHANG is that both of them include Distance relation,Covering relation,Quantity relation,Time relation and Horizontal movement relation.In OVER and SHANG,the conspicuous differences are that the Point-Surface relation and Attaching relation in the static meanings of SHANG are not that of OVER,and the Moving downward relation and Crossing movement relation in the dynamic meanings of OVER are quite distinct from the Moving upward relation of SHANG.Thirdly,in UNDER and XIA,the similarity is that both of them contain Distance relation,Covering relation and Quantity relation,and Time relation.In UNDER and XIA,the difference is that the static meanings of UNDER also contain Touching relation.In addition,UNDER and XIA contain respective Horizontal movement relation and Vertical movement relation.The research results of this thesis show that in theory,by comparing the metaphorical meanings of spatial words in English and Chinese,the research object of image schema theory is not only for English,but also for Chinese,so as to expand the application scope of image schema theory.Moreover,in the teaching practice of English or Chinese as a foreign language,teachers and students should not only pay attention to the conceptual meanings of spatial words,but also pay attention to their metaphorical meanings,and combine them together,so as to increase the flexibility and interest of teaching.