| Preposition, as a basic vocabulary, is used by humans to express the concept of space. In the English language, preposition plays a very important role. The earliest concept of English preposition is derived from Latin. Preposition, paralleled as one of the two mainstreams of English vocabulary, is the most active part of speech in English. The early research of preposition mostly focused on grammar. Due to the complex usage of preposition, it has been the difficulty of learning English. And it is also becoming a focus of study from grammarians and language researchers. But the early research is limited to the position and function of preposition in the sentence. Traditional approach to teaching preposition is to list the individual meanings of a preposition and then to be explained with the examples. However, this traditional method tends to cause the students to memorize mechanically the collocation of prepositions and other words, so it is difficult for them to flexibly employ the prepositions. The newly-born cognitive linguistics, on the basis of human cognition, provides explanation to linguistic phenomenon. It has its originality in terms of the analysis of preposition. With the rising of cognitive linguistics, people have a new understanding to the status of preposition in language. This paper employs the method of cognitive linguistics to study prepositional semantics. Cognitive linguists think that intentional schema and metaphor can effectively interpret the connection between the various meanings of preposition, but most of their studies focus on the theoretical level and ignore the application in teaching. So in this paper, the author attempts to prove the effectiveness of intentional schema and metaphor in teaching through experimental test.Choice of space preposition OVER as research subject, this thesis is to study the meanings of OVER from the perspective of cognitive. It will use intentional schema to explain the spatial meaning of OVER, employ metaphor to further interpret its spatial meaning in an extended sense, and then interpret the connection between the various meanings of OVER, which provides with the basis of the analysis of prepositions for the experiment in Chapter Four. And it tries to explore a suitable method for teaching Chinese students prepositions. Although language scholars at home and abroad have carried out a large number of researches on prepositions and obtained many achievements, but the research on application is not enough. Therefore, first, this essay applies cognitive metaphor theory to analyze a variety of meanings of OVER, and then adopts the cognitive semantic approach to teach prepositions. The research will be applied in teaching experiment on English prepositions of Chinese students, and the effectiveness of this teaching method can be tested through the data and information from the experiment. From the experiment, it is found that the students can grasp preposition more effectively after they master and use intentional schema and metaphor. Compared with the traditional teaching method, it is also found that the students master the cognitive semantics of prepositions through the testing performance. This thesis mainly includes six chapters.Chapter One briefly introduces the importance of English prepositions, analyzes the disadvantages of prepositions in traditional linguistics, this part mentioned that adopt cognitive linguistics to study the semantics of prepositions is especially important. This part systematically introduces the theoretical background of cognitive linguistics, puts forward the importance of this research and works out the structure of this thesis.Chapter Two mainly make a review of the previous studies of preposition, polysemy become one of the most active domain in cognitive linguist, this part mainly elaborate the important achievement for the study of prepositions. However, so many linguistics mentioned about cognitive linguist, how these studies use to the teaching is still insufficient.Chapter Three, this part is the theoretical foundations. It makes the important illustration for the prototype theory, metaphor, image-schema and other related terms, we can draw a conclusion that one meaning among all the related meanings is the prototypic meaning from which the other edge meanings are derived. Metaphor is a common way of human cognition and expressing the experience in the world. It is the structure mapping from one concept domain or cognitive domain to anther concept or cognitive domain; it is a powerful cognitive tool for us to conceptualize abstract categories. Image-schema derives from the interaction between our body and external world. With the repetition of this kind interaction, the image-schema emerges in our brain. The cognitive study on prepositions begins with the study of spatial concepts. The relationship between spatial concepts and prepositions is explored afterwards. So master the spatial concepts of the prepositions is very important, which is the fundamental position to the other concepts. This part put forward a reliable theoretical foundations for the following part through the special elaborate about the theoretical foundations.Chapter Four analyses the significance of OVER. First, the reason why choose over as the object on this study, and then make a detailed elaborated in order to deduce the prototypical features of over within the spatial field. According to the Tyler and Evans put forward five criteria for determining the prototype of a word, it identifies the basic spatial meaning of OVER as "above... and close to...". Then, it combines the approach of full specification, proposed by Lakoff, with image schema to analyze other meanings of OVER. Finally, it analyzes the metaphorical meaning of OVER.Chapter Five describes the application under the the cognitive visual for the preposition OVER. In this part, a teaching experiment will be conducted. Experimental subjects are40freshmen non-English students of Nanchang Institute Of Science And Technology.The students come from two class, class one and class two,we called them Group One and Group Two. Each group of20students. The students of the two groups are taught the same content during the same period. Before doing the same practice, students of group One accept the traditional teaching method on prepositions, while group two students accept the cognitive semantic approach on prepositions. The experiment lasts60minutes, of which40minutes are used to explain prepositions and20minutes to answer questions. After class the two groups will have a test. From the comparison and analysis of testing performance, it is found that group Two does better than group One, which suggests that the cognitive semantic approach is an effective method for prepositional explanation. In addition, the cognitive semantic approach also provides revelation to teach the prepositional idioms and the phrasal verbs.Chapter Six makes a conclusion for this thesis. The result of the experiment shows that this teaching method can emancipate students from the burden of memorizing every sense of each preposition and students will be more interested in the study of English prepositions. |
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