英语论文网

Part 1 Introduction

1.1 Research Background
English prepositions are simple in form and limited in number, but they are the mostpolysemous and widely used words. The study of English prepositions has a longhistory in traditional linguistics, structural linguistics, functional linguistics and soon. These studies all thought that English prepositions, as functional words, don’thave concrete meanings and the focus of studies was syntax which laid semanticmeanings in insignificant position. The linguists in this period treated various sensesof an English preposition as isolated ones. They mainly paid more attention ondescription, generalization and classification of English prepositions withoutreferring to the motivation and mechanism about the formation of semantic networks.In addition, traditional studies thought that complex meanings and complicatedcollocations of English prepositions are fixed and conventional which should bememorized mechanically.How to tell the minor differences among semantic items of every English prepositionpuzzles nearly all learners. During the teaching process with traditional method,teachers usually explain English prepositions in a direct way and students just paymore attention on remembering the usage of English prepositions withoutunderstanding the interrelationship between the different meanings. At the earlystage of learning English vocabulary, for me, it was taken for granted that Englishprepositions are thought to be in insignificant position. The complex meanings ofEnglish prepositions and complicated collocations with different words are just fixed.It took much time for both teachers and students to learn English prepositions. Butwith the time flying, I found that nearly all multiple senses of English prepositionsare not isolated, and they always have a basic sense and to some extent, othermeanings are related with the basic sense. But I didn’t know how to explain thisphenomenon and then I surfed the net to search the related papers. From the relevantmaterials, I realized that multiple senses of English prepositions and theircomplicated collocations with different words are not conventional as mentionedbefore, especially with the appearance of cognitive linguistics.
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1.2 Research Questions and Objectives
The above descriptions indicate that it is worthy of further exploration on Englishprepositions. In order to find an efficient way to penetrate into English prepositions,it is necessary to tend to the cognitive mechanism of extending spatial senses ofEnglish prepositions into non-spatial senses within the framework of image schematheory. So this paper wants to give a study on English prepositions from theimage-schematic view.The complicated semantic networks of English prepositions made the author chooseonly one English preposition INTO as a case-study to do the research. This papermainly focuses on the analysis of the semantic extensions of English prepositionsand with the case-study of INTO. By the advantage of the Spatial Metaphor and theImage Schema Theory, the paper is to explain the polysemous phenomenon ofEnglish prepositions and testify the effect of English preposition teaching withimage schema theory, and automatically to find out the answers to the researchquestions that are listed as follows:[1] What is the prototypical sense of the English preposition INTO?[2] Which cognitive domain does have relations with senses of the Englishpre