| Despite the growing interest in prepositional semantics manifested by linguists and grammarians working in Cognitive Linguistics (Vandeloise (1995), Herskovits (1986), Rice and Sandra (1995), and Langacker (2000)), semantic descriptions of English prepositions remain inadequate. This research deals with the English preposition in. It is conducted within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics as presented by Ronald Langacker (1987). The thesis aims at describing the semantics of the English preposition in by identifying the semantic scope of this preposition in comparison with the prepositions at and into, by defining its semantic content in different cognitive domains, and by proposing a semantic network model for in that would bring together the preposition's different senses and link them to the underlying image-schema of this preposition. |
