A Study On Spatial Prototypical Expansion Of FROM From A Cognitive Perspective

The ability to perceive the spatial location of an object is one of the basic abilities of human being,so people usually employ the concrete spatial concept to interpret some abstract concepts.Preposition is a part of speech that is usually employed to indicate spatial concept.The study on preposition is one of the most important areas in English learning,which can be divided into two approaches: traditional approach and cognitive approach.The traditional approach to preposition mainly focuses on its collocations rather than on preposition itself,on the other hand,the cognitive approach reveals that there is relatedness among the various senses of a preposition.This dissertation is conducted from the cognitive perspective to explore the spatial prototypical expansion of FROM.The studies on how to determine the spatial prototypical sense of the preposition are reviewed first,then the cognitive studies on the expansion of the spatial prototypical sense of preposition are explored.It can be found from the previous studies that the cognitive approach to preposition assumed that there is a single prototypical sense of a preposition,which is usually the spatial sense,and the other senses are derived from this spatial prototypical sense.The theoretical basis of this dissertation is Conceptual Blending Theory which is considered to be a very common cognitive process in constructing the meaning of natural languages.It possesses a strong explanatory power for metaphor because the conceptual blending process is the basic cognitive activity that human being conduct while interpreting metaphorical phenomena.According to spatialization metaphor,the spatial concept is the source domain and the non-spatial concept is the target domain,and the spatial concept is often employed to interpret the non-spatial concept.So this dissertation explores spatial prototypical expansion of the preposition-FROM in order to get the target domain senses of it in the light of Conceptual Blending Theory.Another related concept is image schema which is employed to interpret the spatial prototypical sense of FROM.This is a qualitative oriented study.First,the various senses of FROM appearing in the Crown-corpus are summarized with the help of certain dictionaries.Next,the spatial prototypical sense of FROM is determined by Tyler and Evans’ five criteria of determining the prototypical sense of a preposition.Finally,the spatial prototypical expansion of FROM is explored in the light of Conceptual Blending Theory.As the result,it can be concluded that the spatial prototypical sense of FROM is to indicate the point in space at which a journey,motion,or action starts;the spatial prototypical sense of FROM can expand to nine target domain senses,which are source,logic,time,scope,separation,negation,distinction,state,and absence.One thing to note is that the source domain sense has two sub-domain senses,namely,the sense of indicating the source,origin,or starting point of something or somebody and the sense of using.Besides,the logic domain sense also has two sub-domain senses,namely,the reason sense and the sense of judging by or considering.It can be seen from the analyzing results that Conceptual Blending Theory possesses a strong explanatory power to the senses of FROM,because it can reveal the specific expansion process of the spatial prototypical sense to get the target domain senses of FROM,which will enable the teachers,learners even the researchers to conduct studies on the senses of FROM more effectively.