A Comparative Study Of In/out And Li/Wai

With the gradual promotion of the position of semantic in the linguistics research, cognitive semantics have become the core of cognitive linguistics in 1980s. The main research of cognitive semantics is on the relationship between words and concepts. So far, one of the topics cognitive semantics has focused on is the relation of language to space conceptualization, that is, the linguistic categorization of spatial relations. Because the basic semantic function of prepositions is to express the spatial relations, the semantic of propositions can map from space into other abstract domains extensively by the means of metaphor and metonymy. Therefore, on the theoretical basis of prototype semantics and idealized cognitive models, this study has described and classified the proto-sense and their metaphorical semantic domains of in/out and li(里)/wai(外), and tried to confirm and analyze their similarities and differences from the cognitive point of view.The data in this study are all from BNC Simple Search, PKU-CCL corpora and some authoritative dictionaries. According to Langacker's trajector-landmark theory, Tyler's prepositions dividing standard and related cognitive linguistic theories, this study has classified extensions of target domains of different prepositions, and gotten the distribution of frequency. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, we have found that the proto-sense of prepositions in the space domain are in the same use both in English and Chinese, but the proto-sense of li(里)is higher than proto-sense of in, and the proto-sense of wai(外) is higher than proto-sense of out. When prepositions have extended to the non-spatial domains by the means of metaphor and metonymy, the use of in/out is more frequently and flexible than the use of li(里)/wai(外). Moreover, this study has discovered that metaphorical mapping is the predominant way of mapping, and metonymy can be considered as a special kind of metaphor or the carrier of metaphor.Based on the analysis and the interpretation of in/out and li(里)/wai(外), the study has proved that there may exist a universal cognitive model in different countries and cultures. Besides, it also demonstrated the extensions by the means of metaphor are grounded in our daily experiences and knowledge. The analysis result of this study can apply to the linguistic research and foreign language teaching to some degree. There are also some limitations. For instance, the data in this study is rather limited and the classification of in/out and li(里)/wai(外) may be regarded subjective to some degree. However, the findings of the study are essentially in accordance with the real language use and fit academic research methodology.