인지언어학을 통한 avant과 après의 분석

Abstract

Cognitive Linguistics claims that fundamental cognitive abilities and experientially derived cognitive models have direct and pervasive linguistic manifestations, and conversely, that language structure furnishes important clues concerning basic mental phenomena. The cognitive representation of language is in fact massive and highly redundant, and the most accurate description of it (as a psychological entity) will reflect the size and redundancy. And as such, a language is described as a structured inventory of conventional linguistic units. The paper analyzes the meaning of the preposition, especially the meaning of French prepositions avant and après. The purpose of the analyses about prepositions which expresses the spatial relation is to establish the corelation between our extra-linguistic recognition and spatial linguistic expressions. The analyses proposes three definitions vis-à-vis avant / après's meaning, and their one prototypical definition. After which, the paper will propose après's own distinct meaning as tracking and pursuing. The analyses will try to confirm the fundamental concepts of cognitive linguistics: in that the human language is a non-autonomous system that is associated with the general cognitive abilities of humans. Furthermore, the paper will try confirm that the meaning of spatial expressions is identified through and only through the general recognition of space. This is consistent with the task of the linguistics decribed in Langacker(1999, 71): a language is trying to tell us something about how it structures meanings, and it is our task as linguists to learn to interpret these signs.