A Study Of Polysemy Of The Preposition Through From The Perspective Of Image Schema Theory

Polysemy is a common characteristic of natural language. As Lyons(2000) stated that it is nearly certainly the case that there are no natural languages, and never have been, in which every word has one and only one meaning.Many traditional linguistic schools and linguists put their efforts on the study of polysemy and make great achievements. Different from the traditional opinions, the cognitive linguistics starts from the cognitive point of view, paving a new way for the study of polysemy. They emphasize associations between meanings, build up a radial network model of polysemy based on the prototype theory. But most of the researches in the cognitive field are based on the theory of prototype and categorization with little novelty. The author believes that such researches neglect the hierarchical nature of semantic structure and make no distinctions between different levels of meanings. This study thus build a three-layer semantic model to study the polysemy of preposition through based on the image schema theory, aiming to provide new insight to the development of the polysemy study.Different from prototype-based categorization, this study uses image schema as a basic categorizing relationship and describes a three-layer semantic category including abstract schema, sense schema and contextual schema. Schemas on the same level form a relationship of extension and schemas of different levels form the relationship of elaboration.According to the analysis of data, there are four members in the abstract schema level, namely, THROUGH 1, THROUGH 2, THROUGH 3 and THROUGH 4. THROUGH 1 is the first emerged schema, exhibiting the highest degree of entrenchment and acting as a prototype of this level. Part of its structure is profiled and extends to the other three schemas metonymically. Meanings of through in the sense schema are elaborated from the abstract schema by specifying cognitive domains. The sense schemas usually manifest themselves first in the domain of space, and then extends to other domains by means of metaphorical mapping. Meanings of through in the contextual schema are elaborated from the sense schema by profiling features of schema components and are maximally context-dependent.The sources of through in this study are retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA). Five hundred samples were chosen from the 9796 items in the year of 2012 by means of scientific systematic sampling and stratified sampling to get the latest and scientific information.