第1章 介绍
1.1 一般描述
在英语的话语中，介词扮演着重要的角色。介词的重要性不仅在于揭示组织结构的理论抽象的概念，而且在于两个实体之间的空间关系。如果没有正确使用介词，英语的话语会变得僵硬。但是，复杂的英语介词的用法和搭配，使许多学生感到困惑。The mostcommon way for the students to learn their usages is to learn by rote，which proves tobe a slow method of learning. In the class the teachers usually show some sentences toexplain their usages. And most dictionaries just list sentences arbitrarily. Although thenumber of the prepositions is small, their meaniiigs are so abundant that the teachingand acquisition of the prepositions has become one of the most troublesome problems.
The spatial prepositions describe the spatial relationship between two entities.Compared with other lexical terms，the prepositions cover a small proportion of thevocabulary, but wide range of usage，high frequency, rich semantic meanings andvarious contexts make them act as the joints of the English language. Without properuse of prepositions，the English utterances become rigid and stiff.Despite the important role of prepositions in English，the present approachhttp://www.1daixie.com/dxyylw/ toteaching prepositions is unsatisfactory. Traditional grammarians try to show the usageof prepositions by listing many entries of meanings along with examples. Others, suchas the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English^ prefer to give a long list ofentries of contexts in which the prepositions are used. What traditional grammaremphasizes is presenting as many meanings as possible. They fail to pinpoint thesystematic relation between each entry of meaning, so various meanings ofprepositions are listed idiomatically or arbitrarily. All the meanings occupy equalposition in the semantic structure of the prepositions. It has been universally acceptedthat the common way of learning the prepositions is to learn them by rote. A surveyconducted by the author of this paper showed that more than 99% of students complain the low efficiency of learning prepositions by rote. With this method，theyfailed to form a comprehensive understanding of the meanings of the prepositions.What's worse，the long list of the entries provided by the dictionaries increased theiranxiety in learning English. At the same time，the second language teachers cannotprovide an effective solution to this problem. Most of the teachers, lack of theguidance of any related linguistic theories, organize their teaching on the basis of theirown experience. Some teachers would teach the meanings of prepositions withreference to the similar Chinese structures. The results of the survey show theproblem remains. So the preposition teaching comes to be a short board of Englishteaching which both the teachers and students avoid touching. It is extremely urgentand necessary for us to face this problem and improve the teaching effect of theprepositions.
With the development of the cognitive linguistics, spatial metaphor and imageschema theory provide a new method of observing the various meanings of thosespatial prepositions. This new method shows us clearly the internal relationshipbetween the meanings so as to help the learners grasp the usage of prepositionseffectively.According to Collins Cobuild English Guides: 1. Prepositions, there arealtogether more than 100 prepositions and at least one in each sentence. Based onCollins Corpora, three prepositionsof, to, and in——are among the 10 most frequentlyused English words (Sinclair ii). According http://www.1daixie.com/dxyylw/to the world's seven biggest Corpus(Birmingham, Brown, Lob，Well, AHI，Flob and Frown)，among the first 50 mostfrequently used English words, in ranks the sixth; CLEC (Chinese Learner EnglishCorpus) shows that among the most frequently used words, in ranks the third (桂诗春26). From this statistics，it is easily seen that the prepositions in and to occupyespecially important status in the list of prepositions, hence, this paper selects thesetwo prepositions of in and to as the objects of this teaching experiment.
第2章 文献综述
2.1认知语言学的回顾
隐喻历来被视为英语诗意的或象征性的表达，但许多认知的研究并没有透露他们的认知性质，直到20世纪，认知隐喻概念的首次显着的先驱性著作（1980,1987,1989），约翰逊（1980,1989），莱考夫和Langacker的（1987年，1991年）等。Metaphor theory concerns itself with the cross-domain mappings from the sourcedomain to the target domain. In Metaphors We Live By Lakoff and Johnson gave adetailed description of these two domains. The source domain is the domain whichprovides structure by virtue of metaphor. The target domain refers to the domain beingstructured by virtue of metaphor. Cross-domain mappings persist in long-termmemory and serve to build the target domain in terms of the source domain. Themappings provide one of the important ways in which the conceptual system isorganized. A conceptual metaphor is made up of a set of cross-domain mappings.(Lakoff & Johnson 266) Later，Lakoff pointed out the feature of the metaphoricalmappings in his Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal aboutthe Mind. According to him, the metaphorical mappings are not arbitrary，butgrounded in the body and in everyday experience and knowledge.
Chapter 3. Methodology .............................52-57
3.1 Objective ............................. 52
3.2 Research questions .............................52
3.3 Subjects .............................52-53
3.4 Materials .............................53-54
3.5 Procedures .............................54-57
3.5.1 Pretest ............................. 54
3.5.2 Teaching procedure ............................. 54-55
3.5.3 Posttest ............................. 55-57
Chapter 4 Results and analysis ............................. 57-66
4.1 Results of the survey ............................. 57
4.2 Results Of the pretest .............................57-58
4.3 Results of the posttest .............................58-59
4.4 Results of the comparison ............................. 59-65
4.5 Conclusions .............................65-66
Chapter 5.Summary .............................66-69
5.1. The summary of the study ............................. 66-67
5.2. Implications of the study .............................67-68
5.3 Limitations and suggestions ............................. 68-69
Conclusion结论
At the same time, this research has a positive effect on the other parts of Englishlearning. The experience helps the students to form more effective learning habits andstrategies in English learning, especially the part of vocabulary learning under theframework of cognitive linguistics. At the same time this research helps to reducepressure and arouse the interest in learning English.The cognitive approach also shows positive effect on lexicography. Most of thedictionaries spent several pages on listing the usage of prepositions arbitrarily. Thenew arrangements of the complicated senses of the prepositions in terms ofmetaphorical mapping from spatial domains to abstract domains can make it easier forthe readers to understand the relationship of the senses as a whole，which is alsobeneficial to increase the efficiency and accurateness of the mastery of theprepositions.
Though the result strongly supports the hypothesis, the researches still have somelimitations. The limitations are listed as follows. First, the study just chose thepreposition in and to for the experimental research and failed to make a study of otherprepositions. This result still needs to be testified in a broader scale. Besides，thecognitive training lasted only one month，which means the result needs to be furthertestified in a longer period. Thirdly, in order to guarantee that the experiment issmoothly carried on，the experiment confined itself to the study of the pure usages ofthe two prepositions and does not include the following relatively more complicatedusages like the fixed collocation and the interference from the other prepositions inthe same utterance. Whether the cognitive approach is effective in explaining theusage of fixed collocations with prepositions and whether it is equally effective indistinguishing the overlapped meanings of different prepositions still remainunanswered. These will be the aim of further studies.