A Cognitive Study On The Polysemy Of Into From The Perspective Of A Minimal Polysemy Approach

The study of prepositional polysemy has a long history and has covered various English prepositions,yet the study on the polysemy of into has been relatively rare.What’s more,previous studies on prepositional polysemy mainly adopted the fine-grained polysemy approach proposed by Brugman and Lakoff or the principled polysemy approach put forward by Tyler and Evans,despite the fact that these two approaches are criticized for more or less putting the locally constructed meanings of a preposition into the category of its distinct senses.Different from these two approaches,a minimal polysemy approach holds that it is necessary to strictly distinguish the distinct senses of a preposition,that is,senses coded by the preposition itself,from its locally constructed meanings,thus further restricting the number of senses a preposition has.Basing itself on a minimal polysemy approach,this study adopts a Double-Layer Network Model of Polysemy proposed by Zhang(2010)as its theoretical framework and uses 2000 lines of language samples from the British National Corpus as its language data.Guided by this theoretical framework,this thesis depicts the senses of into on the upper layer and its online meanings on the lower layer as well as explains how cognitive operations and cognitive context(including linguistic context and encyclopedic knowledge)can influence the construction of the online meanings of into.Therefore,a double-layer network model of polysemy for into is established.This research has obtained these results:(1)On the concept layer of the model are 5 image schemas of into,labeled as INTO1(source-path-goal),INTO2(source-path),INTO3(contact),INTO4(penetration)and INTO5(enclosure),among which INTO1 is the central schema and the other schemas are its extension through image-schema transformation.On the context layer are 14 online meanings of into based on the image schemas,including to be in concrete space,to be in a state,static orientation,about,examination,crash,change of form,preference and so on.(2)Conceptual metaphor is the main cognitive operation involved in the construction of the online meanings of into,which serves as an important bridge between the image schemas of into and its online meanings.Since verbs are essential linguistic factors,this research chooses verbs to explain the influence that linguistic context can exert on the construction of the online meanings of into.The research shows that the online meaning of into reflected in a linguistic environment is quite consistent with the type of verb with which it collocates,which to some extent illustrates the influence of linguistic context on the construction of the online meanings of into.This thesis also illustrates how encyclopedic knowledge can influence the online meanings of into through exemplification.