Teaching prepositions, in this case, down and under, to Japanese English learners is difficult at least because of the following two reasons; Firstly, there has been a long dispute in the literature on the semantics of prepositions as to whether prepositions denote only static relationship of Trajectory (TR) and Landmark (LM) (eg. Tyler and Evans 2003), or can denote not only static but also dynamic relations between TR and LM (eg.Dewell 1994, 2007). Under and its counterpart over seem to correspond to the former, while down and up to the latter. However, things are not so straightforward as we have argued in Hanazaki and Hanazaki (2018). This discrepancy in meaning has made the learning of the words difficult. Secondly, there is no one-to-one correspondence of down and under to Japanese. Both of them are translated as SHITA, a noun that depicts a place underneath, with a postposition, usually NI or HE or DE as in SHITA-NI. Hence, it is difficult for the Japanese learners to fully comprehend those meanings. With these observations, this paper, picking up under and down as examples, makes the following three claims; (1) prepositions depicts spatial relationship between two objects, and sometimes the linguistic context in which the prepositions is used may make it seem as if the preposition denotes a dynamic meaning, (2) English prepositions and Japanese postpositions are different in nature, and (3)a modular material teaching the words based on cognitive linguistics highlighting the differences between the target language and the source language may be a key to a better understanding of the words for Japanese English learners.
Key words: TESL, Preposition, Down, Under, Polysemy.
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