Polysemy of the English preposition “through”

The present paper focuses on the semantic structure of the English preposition “through”. The aim of the study is to analyse the mechanisms and results of metaphorization of its spatial meaning. In order to establish the metaphorical meanings of the preposition, the data from the dictionaries were verified by the empirical data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The study confirmed the hypothesis that all non-spatial meanings of this preposition are to a certain degree connected semantically with its prototypical spatial meaning.