A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of By By Chinese English Learners From The Cognitive Perspective

Based on the principled polysemy model put forward by Tyler and Evans,a semantic analysis of by is carried out,investigating the primary sense and distinct senses of by.Then,with CLEC and LOCNESS as the target corpora,a comparative study on the use of by is conducted,to find out the differences in the use of by between Chinese English learners and native English speakers.Through a semantic analysis,the primary sense of by is identified as "near,beside",from which eleven distinct senses are drived.There are Past-and-beyond Sense,Temporal Sense and State Sense constituting the A-B-C Trajectory Cluster.The Location Cluster contains Cause Sense,Agency Sense,Means Sense and Reference Sense.Besides,Difference Sense,Measurement Sense and Rate Sense belong to the Quantity Cluster.Nature Sense derives directly from the proto scene.According to the research,no significant difference is found in the use of the primary sense of by in the chosen corpora.On the part of the distinct senses,low-level learners use the Agency Sense and the Reference Sense much less than high-level learners.What's more,significant differences are tested out on the whole Location Cluster and the Temporal Sense between high-level learners and native speakers.No significant difference is found in other senses.In addition,low-level learners present a higher tendency to make mistakes in the uses of by than high-level learners.In conclusion,Chinese English learners can use the primary sense of by appropriately,but not the distinct senses mentioned above.Besides,the better overall English ability does not guarantee improvement on the mastery of distinct senses,which is partly because that Chinese English learners fail to recognize the cognitive relations among the multiple senses of by,leading to the inadequate use of the distinct senses.In the conclusion,pedagogical implications are put forward for preposition teaching.It also includes limitations of this research and suggestions for the future researches.