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Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1. General description
Prepositions play an important role in English utterances. The importance ofprepositions lies not only in revealing the spatial relationship between two entities，butalso in organizing the conception structures for the comprehension of abstractconceptions. Without proper use of prepositions，the English utterance becomes rigid.But the complicated usages and collocations of English prepositions make manystudents confused, and consequently，misuse them in English utterances. The mostcommon way for the students to learn their usages is to learn by rote，which proves tobe a slow method of learning. In the class the teachers usually show some sentences toexplain their usages. And most dictionaries just list sentences arbitrarily. Although thenumber of the prepositions is small, their meaniiigs are so abundant that the teachingand acquisition of the prepositions has become one of the most troublesome problems.

1.2 Significance of the study
The spatial prepositions describe the spatial relationship between two entities.Compared with other lexical terms，the prepositions cover a small proportion of thevocabulary, but wide range of usage，high frequency, rich semantic meanings andvarious contexts make them act as the joints of the English language. Without properuse of prepositions，the English utterances become rigid and stiff.Despite the important role of prepositions in English，the present approach toteaching prepositions is unsatisfactory. Traditional grammarians try to show the usageof prepositions by listing many entries of meanings along with examples. Others, suchas the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English^ prefer to give a long list ofentries of contexts in which the prepositions are used. What traditional grammaremphasizes is presenting as many meanings as possible. They fail to pinpoint thesystematic relation between each entry of meaning, so various meanings ofprepositions are listed idiomatically or arbitrarily. All the meanings occupy equalposition in the semantic structure of the prepositions. It has been universally acceptedthat the common way of learning the prepositions is to learn them by rote. A surveyconducted by the author of this paper showed that more than 99% of studentscomplain the low efficiency of learning prepositions by rote. With this method，theyfailed to form a comprehensive understanding of the meanings of the prepositions.What's worse，the long list of the entries provided by the dictionaries increased theiranxiety in learning English. At the same time，the second language teachers cannotprovide an effective solution to this problem. Most of the teachers, lack of theguidance of any related linguistic theories, organize their teaching on the basis of theirown experience. Some teachers would teach the meanings of prepositions withreference to the similar Chinese structures. The results of the survey show theproblem remains. So the preposition teaching comes to be a short board of Englishteaching which both the teachers and students avoid touching. It is extremely urgentand necessary for us to face this problem and improve the teaching effect of theprepositions.With the development of the cognitive linguistics, spatial metaphor and imageschema theory provide a new method of observing the various meanings of thosespatial prepositions. This new method shows us clearly the internal relati本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。