A Cognitive Semantic Extension Study Of BEYOND Based On Image Schema Theory

In traditional studies,prepositional semantics is confined to the lexicon itself,and prepositional collocations are considered fixed and conventional,while the intrinsic semantic connections between prepositional senses are ignored.Cognitive linguistics began in the late 1970 s and early 1980 s,which advocates that language comes from human experience and cognition of the external world,and that the semantics of English prepositions originates from people’s repeated spatial experiences,so there has been a large number of studies on the polysemy of prepositions based on the relevant theories of cognitive linguistics.Image schema theory is one of the important theories in cognitive linguistics,and has made an important contribution to guiding the study of the semantic extension of English prepositions,which has received wide attention from the academic community in recent years.Based on the image schema theory,this study adopts qualitative and quantitative research methods to investigate the cognitive mechanism of the semantic extension of the English preposition beyond.After analyzing and annotating the corpus with dictionary definitions and using EXCEL software to count and summarize the annotated corpus,this paper draws the following conclusions: Firstly,the image schemas that characterize the meanings of beyond are the center-periphery schema,path schema,and container schema,among which centerperiphery schema arises from people’s bodily experience in the spatial domain and is the basic spatial schema of beyond.Secondly,the cognitive mechanism of beyond semantic extension is as follows: Under certain circumstances,the center-periphery schema of beyond can be variant to path schema in the spatial domain,and the spatial path schema can be mapped to the temporal domain;The spatial center-periphery schema can be mapped to the degree domain,capability domain,and social domain,where the center-periphery schema varies to container schema in the process of mapping to capability domain and social domain.Based on the five criteria for determining the primary sense of prepositions,this study concludes that “on or to the further side of something” is the primary sense of beyond,which is characterized by the spatial center-periphery schema.Therefore,the path schema and container schema of beyond are all variations of center-periphery schema,and the corresponding meanings of beyond in the temporal domain,degree domain,capability domain,and social domain are all semantic extensions of its primary sense in the abstract domain.Finally,this study finds that the frequency of each abstract sense occurrence of beyond varied considerably in the diachronic process,which is closely related to the difference in distance from the basic image schema mapping of space to each abstract domain.The findings of this thesis enrich the theory of image schema and also hope to be of practical help to the teaching and acquisition of English prepositions and lexicography.Finally,the author puts forward some implications for future cognitive research on English prepositions.