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A Cognitive Semantics Analysis of the Lexical Units At, on and in in English

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A Cognitive Semantics Analysis of the Lexical Units At, on and in in English UNIVERSITAT JAUME I DEPARTAMENT DE FILOLOGIA ANGLESA I ROMANICA A COGNITIVE SEMANTICS ANALYSIS OF THE LEXICAL UNITS AT, ON AND IN IN ENGLISH Ph. D. Dissertation presented by: Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando Supervised by: Dr. Carlos Hernández Sacristán Dr. José Luis Otal Campo Castelló de la Plana 1998 I ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This investigation would not have been possible without the invaluable dialogue I have maintained over the recent years with the two supervisors of this dissertation: Dr. Carlos Hernández Sacristán and Dr. José Luis Otal Campo. My recognition and gratitude to the Deutsches Akademisches AuslandsDienst (DAAD), for a postgraduate scholarship during the academic year 1990-91, at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, where Prof. Dieter Seelbach opened my eyes to semantics. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Prof. George Lakoff for his invitation to the Department of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where I was a visiting scholar in 1995, as well as for the interesting discussions we had on semantics, prepositions and metaphor, which strongly influenced my views on these matters. Also to Prof. Frederike van der Leek for her invitation to the Department of English at the University of Amsterdam, where I was a visiting scholar in the summer of 1997, and for her kind hospitality and interesting discussions on semantics and polysemy. I would also like to thank my colleagues at UJI for their friendship and support, in particular Carmen Campoy Cubillo and Juan Carlos Ruiz Anton, who facilitated access to materials I have used in my investigation. Additional thanks to Deborah Tricker and Fiona McClelland who played, in a way, the role of informants by answering my questions on particular uses of at, on and in. In addition, I am grateful to Deborah Tricker for solving many of my doubts on English style.Very special thanks to Ulrike Oster for teaching me the niceties of computer word processing, and for transmitting to me her spirit of endurance. Of course, any deficiencies that might be found in the pages of this dissertation are the result of my own lack of experience. III CONTENTS List of abbreviations........................................................................................................VIII List of tables .................................................................................................................... IX List of figures................................................................................................................... X 0. INTRODUCTION 0.1 The Problem ........................................................................................................ 1 0.2 Aims and scope of this work ................................................................................ 3 0.3 Hypothesis and corpus ........................................................................................ 5 0.4 Summary of the work........................................................................................... 6 1. COGNITIVE SCIENCE AND COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS 1.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 8 1.2 Issues in the Philosophy of Language ................................................................. 8 1.3 Issues in Psycholinguistics .................................................................................. 11 1.4 Issues in Anthropology, Neuroscience and AI..................................................... 13 1.5 Mental Representations ....................................................................................... 14 1.6 Assumptions and terminology in Cognitive Linguistics ...................................... 17 2. THE SYNTAX OF AT, ON AND IN 2.0 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 20 2.1 General theories on the category of prepositions .............................................. 20 2.1.1 Traditional Grammar........................................................................................ 20 2.1.2. Hjelmslev’s Government Theory....................................................................... 22 2.1.3. Brøndal's logical conception ............................................................................ 23 2.1.4. The Functionalist conception............................................................................ 25 2.1.4.1 Rank Theory......................................................................................... 25 2.1.4.2 Dependence Grammar......................................................................... 25 2.1.4.3 Martinet’s Functional Grammar ......................................................... 27 2.1.5 The Structuralist Conception ............................................................................ 27 2.1.5.1 American Structuralism ....................................................................... 27 2.1.5.2 European Structuralism....................................................................... 28 2.1.6. Summary ........................................................................................................... 28 2.2 The category of prepositions in English.............................................................. 29 2.2.1 Grammatical description .................................................................................. 29 2.2.2 Problems arising from the grammatical description ........................................ 31 2.2.3 The problem of syntactic categorisation........................................................... 31 2.2.4 Sroka's theorem................................................................................................. 32 2.3. On the search of the semantic component........................................................... 36 2.3.1 Generative Grammar ........................................................................................ 36 2.3.2 Case Grammar.................................................................................................. 36 2.3.3 Government and Binding Theory...................................................................... 37 2.3.4 Lexical Functional Grammar............................................................................ 37 2.3.5 Conceptual Semantics....................................................................................... 38 2.3.6 Situation Semantics........................................................................................... 39 2.3.7 Role and Reference Grammar........................................................................... 41 2.3.8 Cognitive Grammar .......................................................................................... 43 2.3.9. Summary ........................................................................................................... 44 IV 2.4 Case endings, prepositions, subordinators, adverbs, verbs: a continuum ............................................................................................................ 45 2.4.1 The schematic end of the continuum: the genitive ............................................ 47 2.4.2 Of....................................................................................................................... 48 2.4.3 To ...................................................................................................................... 49 2.4.4 The At-group ..................................................................................................... 50 2.4.5 The For-vs. but-group....................................................................................... 50 2.4.6 The Across-group.............................................................................................. 51 2.4.7 After and before ................................................................................................ 52 2.4.8 Adverbs ............................................................................................................. 53 2.4.9 Conclusions on the categorisation of prepositions ........................................... 54 3. COGNITIVE SEMANTICS APPROACH TO SEMANTIC STRUCTURE 3.0 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 58 3.1 Experiential semantics......................................................................................... 58 3.2 Categorisation ..................................................................................................... 59 3.2.1 Classical vs. natural categories........................................................................ 59 3.2.2 Prototype theory................................................................................................ 61 3.2.3 Implications for linguistic categorisation......................................................... 64 3.3 Image schemas and conceptual schemas............................................................. 65 3.3.1 Preconceptual image schemas.......................................................................... 65 3.3.2 Conceptual schemas.......................................................................................... 67 3.3.3 Extensions ......................................................................................................... 68 3.3.4 Image schemas and spatial meaning ................................................................ 68 3.4 Construal ............................................................................................................
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