A Study Of Theacquisition Of English Prepositions In, On And At By Chinese EFL Learners From The Cognitive Linguistic Perspective

In the language of English, polysemy, multi-function and high frequency characterizethe prepositions. Because of these characteristics, English prepositions are quite difficult forforeign learners, and Chinese EFL learners are also no exception. Some researchers havealready been concerning the ways to solve the difficulty with English prepositions acquisitionfor foreign learners. Halliday (1994) put forward the idea that the function of prepositionsbears a similarity to verbs in English sentences, the earliest work in the polysemy of theEnglish preposition over was carried out by Brugman (1981), and Zhang Daozhen (1981) andZhang Zhenbang (1981) have studied English prepositions from the perspective ofstructuralism. However, some questions still exist concerning the proper use of the Englishprepositions. Therefore, it is necessary to study this issue further.The research is conducted from the perspective of the cognitive linguistics and it is onthe basis of the principled polysemy network, which was put forward by Tyler andEvans(2001) at first. They named the primary sense related to a spatial particle as theproto-sense in their cooperative research on the semantic model of English prepositions. Thisresearch attempts to find out the problems with Chinese learners’ acquisition of Englishprepositions. Through a qualitative and quantitative research on the English prepositions in,on and at by Chinese EFL learners, the thesis intends to address the following questions:1. What are the primary senses, intermediate senses and peripheral senses of in, on andat for the Chinese EFL learners in the principled polysemy networks?2. Are there any difference in the semantic classifications of the prepositions among the three different proficiency groups?3. Are there any influence of the primary sense on the English preposition learning forChinese EFL learners? What are the possible reasons for the difficulty with prepositionacquisition?In order to answer the above questions,300subjects of different proficiency levels weretested (100for lower-intermediate,100for upper-intermediate, and100for advanced). All thesubjects are required to accomplish two tasks. One is to classify the English prepositionssemantic members of in, on and at. The other one is to choose the proper preposition tocomplete the sentence. After that, SPSS is used to analyze the statistic results of the research.The main findings are listed below:1. Data analysis shows that the primary senses of in is [at a point],[while doing] is theperipheral sense, and the remaining members are the intermediate ones; the primary sense ofon is [at or near a point],[compared with] and [affected by] are the peripheral senses, and therest ones are the intermediate senses; the primary sense of at is [at a point],[because of] and[in response to] are the peripheral senses, and the rest of the semantic senses are theintermediate ones.2. The lower-intermediate Chinese EFL learners manifest much difference in senseclassifications of the more complicated principled polysemy networks of in and on comparedwith the upper-intermediate and the advanced learners. However, as to the relatively simplepolysemy network of at, the sense classifications are nearly same among the three differentproficiency groups.3. The primary senses of English prepositions do influence the English prepositionlearning of Chinese EFL learners indeed.1) The similarities between the primary sense of in,on and at and the other prepositions may exert the negative effects on English prepositionslearning and use,2) the distinctions between the primary sense of in, on and at and theirChinese interpretations would cause the negative influence on English prepositions learningand use. Besides, the possible reasons might be the mother language transfer, Englishteachers’teaching method and the layout of English grammar textbook.