A Principled Polysemy Approach To Uyghur Postposition Bilεn And Its Mandarin Corresponding Expressions

Adopting the cognitive linguistics perspective which acknowledges that the spatial language is based on the highly elaborated conceptualisation of the interactions between the human and the outside spatio-physical world,this dissertation conducts an analysis of the polysemy of the spatial postposition bilεm in the Modern Uyghur language,by associating the Principled Polysemy Approach proposed by Tyler&Evans(2001,2003).It argues that the primary sense of bilεn is the Comitative Sense,from which the other distinct senses are derived through image schema transformation and conceptual metaphor and it reveals the complex derivation relations between the distinct senses by diagramming a semantic network.The dissertation also analysed the corresponding word classes or phrase types and the sentence constituents of the original phrases containing postposition bilεn when translate the sentences into Mandarin.The translation method and translation skills applied in the translation process are also analysed in the dissertation.The dissertation is consisted of five chapters.Chapter 1 is a brief introduction of the research questions,research target and research methods employed in the dissertation.It also contains a brief introduction of Principled Polysemy Approach and relative concepts in cognitive linguistics to help the reader grasp the general idea of the dissertation.Chapter 2 introduces relative theories of the dissertation and gives detailed introduction of Principled Polysemy Approach.The chapter also reviews the research of Uyghur postposition,particularly the research concerns bilεn.Chapter 3 confirms the distinct senses of bilεn and its primary sense,which is reflected in Figure 3-2,according to Principled Polysemy Approach.The distinct senses of the postposition are comitative,manner,reason,being-dominant,instrument,path,base,adversative,location,direction and temporal sense,among which the comitative is the primary one.Building on which,the semantic network of bilεn(Figure 3-6)and image schemas of each sense(Figure 3-7 to Figure 3-16)are given to reveal the relations between different senses.Combining with the language data,chapter 4 analyses the corresponding word classes or phrase types and constituents in Mandarin and discusses the translation methods and translation skills employed.The corresponding word classes are nouns,adpositions,verbs,adjectives and adverbs,the corresponding constituents are subjective,predicate,objective,modifiers,adverbials and complement.The translation methods employed are literal translation and liberal translation.The translation skills employed are word adding,word deleting,concretization and abstraction of word meaning and change of constituent.Chapter 5 serves as the conclusion by summarising the content and pointing out the lacks and values of the dissertation.