Making Sense Of 'Sense'

This dissertation presents an in-depth study of the prepositional polysemy. Working within a cognitive linguistic framework, the present study focuses on the semantic decomposition and the mental representation as exemplified in the prepositions of over, on and through so as to set forth a set of criteria for the sense division and representation of preposition entries in learner's dictionaries.Prepositions are often considered to be Function words or be too polysemous to warrant a proper semantic description. Traditionally, various meanings associated with a given preposition have been analyzed as unrelated. In learner's dictionaries, the presentation of preposition entries is mostly inadequate, e.g., inaccurate, misleading and with mismatched examples. The problem is mainly due to a vague understanding of what a prepositional sense is and lack of criteria for determining whether a particular instance of a preposition could be counted as a distinct sense.The assumptions underlying our study are that (1) semantic structure derives from and reflects conceptual structure and (2) human conceptualization is the product of embodied experience. We posit that each preposition is represented by a primary sense, which in turn interacts with a highly constrained set of cognitive principles to derive a set of additional distinct senses, forming a motivated semantic network.Accepting the standard assumption that the primary sense encoded by prepositions is a particular spatial relation between a Trajector (TR) and a Landmark (LM), we propose two criteria for determining whether a particular instance of a preposition could be counted as a distinct sense:A use of a preposition is recognized as distinct only if (1) its interpretation...