A Study Of The Metaphorical Extensions Of English Preposition WITH From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

Preposition, as an important part of speech in the English language, has been considered as a hot topic by many linguistic scholars. The meanings of prepositions are very flexible. One preposition may have one meaning at the very beginning, but with the development of social culture and the constant emergency of new concepts, people will, according to their actual needs, endow prepositions with new meanings. And the polysemy phenomenon of English preposition has been studied by many scholars. But most of the scholars focus on studying prepositions “at, in, on, under” from different angles such as functional perspective or syntactic perspective, though great achievements have been made, it can be still found that there is a lack of the deep and comprehensive researches about the relationship among the different meanings of English preposition WITH from the perspective of conceptual metaphor.Traditional linguists have studied preposition WITH, but they just focus more attention on studying WITH from the syntactic perspective, that is, they try to analyze WITH’s syntactic function, but they ignore the relationship between the evolution of meanings of WITH and human cognition development and they ignore the influence of the external world on the changes of meanings of WITH. While, in the 1970 s, with the continuous development of Cognitive Linguistics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory is becoming more and more important. The essence of metaphor is discussed in the cognitive field. With the publishment of the book, metaphors we live by, Lakoff and Johnson points out that metaphor is ubiquitous and that metaphors can not only be found in our daily languages, but also in our thoughts and actions. The nature of metaphor, from the cognitive perspective, is a mapping from source domain to target domain. Human’s life experience is the foundation of human cognition(Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Cognitive linguists believe that human cognition is the cause of human language. In daily life, the common metaphorical expressions exactly reflect the metaphorical feature of our cognition.On the basis of the theory of conceptual metaphor, taking the sentences containing English preposition WITH in the British National Corpus as examples, this thesis is going to explore how many metaphorical target domains are extended to from the original source domains of WITH and each mapping process will be explained. Examples in chapter 4 of the thesis are all selected from the British National Corpus(BNC). Through the network retrieval and careful checking, 296 sentences out of 659332 are viewed as valid examples and are classified into two kinds: Original spatial meanings: “accompany”, “co-participant”, “togetherness” and metaphorical non-spatial meanings: “having or carrying”, “using sth.”, “dependence”, “as it happens”, “because of, as a result”, “in spite of”, “in opposition to”, “separation”, “agreement”, “comparison”, “scope, range”, “exclamations”, “employed by or using service”, “understand”. Then the process of mapping from original spatial meanings to metaphorical non-spatial meanings will be discussed from the perspective of conceptual metaphor. After a careful analysis, it is found that non-spatial meanings can be mapped into six target domains from spatial domains. The six target domains are: TIME, MANNER, STATE, LOGIC, OBJECT and OTHERS.After a detailed qualitative analysis, it can be found that there exist a intrinsic relationship between the WITH’s original spatial meanings of WITH and metaphorical non-spatial meanings of WITH. The thesis is helpful to English teaching and learning, for it is not easy for English learners to master English prepositions WITH, so a discussion of WITH’s various meanings may provide some enlightenment for their English learning.