Abstract
Spatial relation is a basic existent relation in the objective world, and in English, prepositions are the important spatial terms to describe spatial relations people perceive. Using Langacker’s trajector-landmark theory from cognitive grammar, this paper attempts to analyze the cognitive process of the six main spatial meaning of English preposition across based on the entries collected by the Collins Dictionary, with data from the the Leeds Collection of Internet Corpora. The findings can be concluded: (1) The use of across should include at least a tr and a lm, and the lm cannot be covert. (2) The spatial relations across contains could be divided into simple atemporal relation and complex atemporal relation. (3) The tr in some dynamic relation of across sometimes will represent some kind of schema, such as source-path-goal schema.
Highlights
Originated from the study of perceptual cognition in psychology, the concept of space has been drawing a lot of attention from the cognitive linguistics field, and from the field of anthropology, brain science and some other fields (Tyler & Evans, 2003)
When we try to describe a spatial relation, we usually find out a reference, or landmark firstly, and using different spatial terms to profile the relations according to our spatial conception
Under the framework of cognitive grammar theory, we found that the relation between the trajector and the landmark with which the preposition is associated can be simple or complex
Summary
Originated from the study of perceptual cognition in psychology, the concept of space has been drawing a lot of attention from the cognitive linguistics field, and from the field of anthropology, brain science and some other fields (Tyler & Evans, 2003). The reason why choosing the preposition “across” is that some information about the geometry of the figure seems to be encoded in the spatial prepositions “across” (Jackendoff & Landau, 1991), the use of which depends on the orientation of the linear axis of the Figure (Feist, 2000) Since it has six types of meanings, this thesis tries to figure out the question that (1) could it be possible that these meanings can be classified into different categories according to their different representation of spatial relations; and (2) do every tr and lm every sense of across represents the same pattern when profiling spatial configuration
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