A Cognitive Study Into The Metaphorical Usages Of Over In News Reporting

The present study illustrates the non-arbitrary properties of the polyseous lexicon through an in-depth investigation into newest usages of over in news reporting. In contrast to the previous discussions, we posit that the semantic extension is a pragmatic phenomenon. Various factors such as usage event, context and background knowledge will greatly affect the interpretation or inference of the lexicon. The inferred meaning, in turn, entertains the possibility of being stored in mind as a distinct meaning. Therefore, the role of sentential context and background knowledge is addressed in the course of our exploration. The data for the current use comes from the online editions of two mainstream news publications in the United States—the daily newspaper Christian Science Monitor (2010) and the weekly magazine Time (2010). Due to the limitation of time and space, we pick up five most frequently used meanings of over in each publication. It is very interesting to find that the five meanings are same in both publications, though different in frequency. What's more, four, among the five, are non-spatial meanings for over. Through a detailed look at the contexts over is used, we demonstrate the usefulness of linguistic and extra-linguistic factors in contributing the semantic change. We also see there is some degree of regularity in those processes of semantic extension. That is, the mechanism of metaphorization plays a very important role in the semantic extension. Previous discussions fail to develop some criteria as to how to determine the primary sense and how to determine a distinct sense for over. So much attention is also given to these methodological challenges in the paper. Hopefully the present study can shed light on the investigations of other spatial particles.