A Cognitive Analysis Of Prepositional Polysemy And Its Pedagogical Implications-With A Case Study Of Under

How to acquire vocabulary has always been one of the biggest problems in the process of learning English as a foreign language for most Chinese students. Prepositions, as the most widely and frequently used word class in English, often cause confusion among the students. This thesis will take prepositions as the study subject to illustrate how to help students acquire vocabulary in a more systematic way.Traditional linguists take a descriptive method toward the semantics of prepositions, which just put emphasis on the function of prepositions in relation with other word classes and neglect the internal relationships among the complex meanings. As a contrast, cognitive linguists take a different perspective. In their research, the prepositional polysemy takes important place. According to them, prepositional polysemy refers to the phenomenon whereby a single preposition is associated with a number of related but distinct meanings or senses. Surrounding a primary sense, a semantic or polysemy network is formed. With this common belief, they have developed various research ways. Among them, the Tyler & Evans'model shows its advantages.After making an extensive investigation on previous researches, Tyler & Evans find out the well-motivated criteria for (1) determining the primary sense associated with a preposition and (2) determining the distinct senses within the polysemy network. They take account of meaning construction as a process which relies upon conceptual integration of linguistic and nonlinguistic prompts, guided by various global cognitive principles. This thesis is meant to further prove the feasibility of the cognitive approach for prepositional polysemy analysis which is put forward by Tyler & Evans and to apply their model to the foreign language teaching.The present research is significant in two aspects. First, even though some researchers have analyzed the preposition under, few have ever worked out a systematic semantic structure of it. Basing on a widely study on various uses of under and Tyler & Evans'model, this thesis gives the semantic network of it, which further proves the validity of this model. Second, this study proposes a new approach in teaching prepositions. It is not only helpful for the teachers but also for the students to develop their lexical competence.