THE MEANING TRANSFERENCE FROM SPATIAL TO NON-SPATIAL MEANINGS OF BELOW

Abstract

This paper analyses the transference from spatial to non-spatial meanings of below as a preposition, an adverb, and a particle within the 2017 Corpus of Contemporary American English, genre: fiction. In light of the Multimodal Image Theory and Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the data analysis shows that the prototypical meaning of below has two variants in its Visual space, and two non-spatial meanings namely Less and Inferior. The mechanism of meaning transference is mappings in which salient aspects of absence of contact, force, and occlusion between the Trajector (TR) and Landmark (LM) are retained in construing the non-spatial scenes associated with the word.