A Cognitive Study On The Spatiotemporal Meanings Of Prepositional Phrases In Hemingway’s Short Stories

Hemingway is a famous American writer in the 20 th century.Many scholars have studied his short stories from the perspective of literature and these studies mainly focus on the narrative characteristics,artistic style,iceberg theory,gender relations and so on.However,there are few studies on Hemingway’s short stories from the perspective of linguistics,especially from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.Hemingway’s short stories are full of dialogues.In the short dialogues,the choice of prepositional phrases reflects Hemingway’s interpretation of specific scenes.Therefore,from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,this thesis employs metaphor theory and image schema theory to study the following issues:(1)What are the Cross-domain spatiotemporal meanings of prepositional phrases in Hemingway’s short stories?(2)What are the Dimension spatiotemporal meanings of prepositional phrases in Hemingway’s short stories?(3)What are the Measurement spatiotemporal meanings of prepositional phrases in Hemingway’s short stories?The findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)In addition to expressing the basic spatial meanings,the use of prepositional phrases in Hemingway’s short stories also maps to time domain,states domain and object domain through spatial metaphor,thus expressing different meanings in his short stories.(2)In Hemingway’s short stories,prepositional phrases are used to express different spatiotemporal meanings.Spatial meanings are zero-dimensional,onedimensional,two-dimensional and three-dimensional,while temporal meanings are only zerodimensional and one-dimensional.(3)In Hemingway’s short stories,prepositional phrases are used to express two different kinds of spatiotemporal meanings: measurable and immeasurable.It can be seen that the analysis of prepositional phrases in Hemingway’s short stories from the perspective of cognitive linguistics can deconstruct literary works from the internal structure of literary texts,and analyze more detailed language structure,so as to more accurately analyze the literariness of literary works and the meanings to be expressed between words.In academic research,this thesis provides a new perspective for the study of Hemingway’s short stories,combining linguistic research with literary research;from the perspective of literature teaching,this study provides new ideas and teaching contents for English literature teachers;in literature reading,the research of this thesis provides a new reading perspective for English learners and helps them improve their reading ability.