A Corpus-based Cognitive Research On The Uses Of Preposition Through In The Compositions Of Chinese College Students

Study on prepositions has always been an important part in linguistics.Cognitive linguistics develops and offers linguists a new theoretical perspective to study prepositions.It is found that many previous researches focus on the analysis of some frequently-used prepositions such as in,on and at,while prepositions like through receives less attention.And corpus-based studies on using features of prepositions among Chinese college students within the framework of cognitive linguistics are much fewer.It is therefore of necessity to conduct a relevant study on the meanings and uses of preposition through.Based on the two corpora TECCL-U and NESSIE-U,this paper aims at investigating the using features of the preposition through in the compositions written by Chinese college students from the cognitive perspective.The Image Schema theory and TR-LM relation will be applied as the analytical framework to discuss the spatial meanings and metaphorical extensions of through.This thesis attempts to answer the following two questions:1.What are the differences in using through between Chinese college students and native English speakers in terms of the overall frequencies,positions and collocations?2.Compared with native English speakers,what are the features in using the spatial meanings and metaphorical extensions of through by Chinese college students?The major findings are as follows:First,in terms of the overall frequencies of through,it is underused in the compositions of Chinese college students.In terms of the positions,Chinese college students commonly use through both in the initial and middle positions of sentences.As for collocates of through,the major four different word class categories used by Chinese college students are adverbs,nouns,verbs and determiners.Second,the image schema of through can be figured as the structure of source-path-goal.The spatial meanings of through can be divided into static and dynamic meanings.Chinese college students tend to use comparatively more spatial meanings of through than native English speakers.Additionally,they use more d)ynamic meanings of through than its static meanings.Thirdly,the metaphorical extensions of through can be classified into three major domains,the domain of manner,the domain of time,and the domain of target.Each domain also contains several sub-domains.Chinese college students tend to overuse the manner and time metaphorical senses of through while underusing the sense of target.It is also found that Chinese college students are confined to use metaphorical meanings of through in the fixed phrase pattern;they prefer to use through in collocates with nouns and present participle due to the interference of mother tongue and insufficient input.It is hoped that the major findings will shed some light on preposition teaching and learning,as well as future studies on other prepositions.First,teachers are suggested to introduce some cognitive concepts so as to help students build image schema structures of prepositions while teaching;second,students are hoped to understand the relations among different meanings of prepositions and pay more attention to their uses in the writing practice;finally,this study provides a reference for future researches on the meanings and uses of other prepositions.