The Semantic Analysis of the Preposition “Through” From the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

Prepositions are the most active words in English. Since the late 20th century, linguists have made some deep and comprehensive studies about the polysemy of prepositions. Especially, the emergency of cognitive linguistics offers a new perspective for the study of prepositions. Under the framework of cognitive linguistics, this paper will analyze the preposition “through” from six domains by means of cognitive theories, including prototype theory, image schema theory and conceptual metaphor. It is found that the prototypical meaning of “through” is its spatial meaning. And the extension of the word is achieved with the aid of source-path-goal schema and spatial metaphor from the spatial domain to non-spatial domains. Based on these findings, a conclusion is drawn that all the non-prototypical meanings of one particular preposition are derived from its prototypical meaning and the study of the prototypical meaning is of great significance to the acquisition of English preposition meaning.