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position INTO?[3] What is the cognitive mechanism of extending the spatial senses of the Englishpreposition INTO into the non-spatial senses?[4] Can the image schema theory improve the acquisition of the English prepositionINTO and have an extended influence on the students’ ability to learn Englishprepositions?By putting forward these four questions, the dissertation is devoted to clarifying thepolysemous phenomenon of English prepositions and exploring the prepositionteaching validity of image schema theory.
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Part 2 Theoretical Framework and LiteratureReview

2.1 literature review
In this chapter, the author will give an introduction to the literature review of thepaper and it consists of two parts, that is, studies on English prepositions and imageschema. And each part is concerned with both abroad and domestic studies.It is obvious that traditional studies have given a great push to the study of Englishprepositions in the history. Wood (1967) claimed that multiple senses of everyEnglish preposition were arbitrary and had no relations with each other; Fillmore(1968) held the view that within the framework of Case Grammar, Englishprepositions was used to describe case relations and they were specified by the caseframe of a verb which was the main function of English prepositions; Cooper (1968)and Leech (1969) did a research on the English preposition IN by giving it adefinition. The way in which Cooper and Leech investigated prepositional meaningsis popular because of its one to one mapping between language and spatial world;Herskovits (1986) made an analysis of spatial prepositions that involves three levelsof representations which made the definitions of English prepositions and thedescriptions of prepositional meanings more accurate; Rauh (1991) made a greatcontribution to analyzing English prepositions by adopting TransformationGenerative grammatical approach.
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2.2 Theoretical Framework
The theoretical proposals which are adopted to analyze the polysemous phenomenonof English prepositions are illustrated in this section. And they are the backbone ofthe whole paper.The traditional study of metaphor can be traced back to Aristotle called the classicalview of metaphor. However, with the appearance of cognitive linguistics at the endof the 20th century, the cognitive study of metaphor was initiated by Lakoff andJohnson in 1980 with the publication of the book Metaphors We Live By. In the book,they broke through the shortcomings of the traditional view on metaphor bypersisting that metaphor is no longer a rhetoric device or simple linguisticphenomenon and regarding metaphor as conceptual metaphor. Moreover, conceptualmetaphor is divided into three kinds on the basis of different source domains byLakoff and Johnson, that is, structural metaphor, ontological metaphor and spatialmetaphor. Among the three kinds of conceptual metaphor, spatial metaphor is one ofthe most popular ones by comparing it with the other two metaphors under theframework of cognitive linguistics. Spatial metaphor refers to the metaphor whichcan map the source domain onto the target domain in that it has the source domain ofspace. Lakoff and Johnson (1980:14) claimed that spatial metaphor is the mostessential concept that we live by in our daily life and it is derived from theinteractions between human beings and nature, such as UP-DOWN, IN-OUT,FRONT-BACK as well as ON-OFF and so on. And these s