Cognitive Analysis Of Spatial Prepositions Above, On And Over

The goal of this thesis is to construct prototype schemata and top schemata for spatial semantic content of English prepositions ABOVE, ON and OVER respectively, and to answer the question how these prepositions interact in the semantic field defined by the up axis.For this purpose, Langacker's schematic network model is adopted. The model consists of three node types and two types of relations. A schema has prototype effects on its extended instances, and this prototype schema and its extension specialize the dominating schema. Three node types are of any degree of complexity, and side-step the long existing controversy of whether category representations take the form of schema, prototype or actual example. Specialization of schemata by hierarchical prototypes and instances overcomes the over-abstractness of schematic representations. In the network model, horizontal growth by extension from prototype schemata is inherently associated with its vertical growth of extractions of schemata. This seems more natural to accommodate lexical changes brought about by acquisition and grammaticalization. It should be pointed out that the schema of cognitive salience is at the basic level of a prepositional category.Construction of schemata for ABOVE and ON begins with a search for prototypical senses through Experiment 1 which takes the method of sentence generation task. Responded uses of each preposition are classified into a number of senses according to their semantic similarities. Frequency of classified senses is counted by percentage and the sense of the greatest frequency is considered to be the prototype. Other senses are compared with this prototype to find their similarities for building a dominating schema or schemata. The schema and schemata arrived at can be elaborated into rich images in contexts through valence relations. ABOVE and ON are studied in this way, while the search for the prototype of OVER is mainly based on Lakoff s study.The analysis shows that each of the three prepositions has its own schematic network. The top schema for ABOVE is that TR is higher than LM along the up axis with no contact between the entities. Since the up axis is not necessarily vertical, prototypical schema for ABOVE is that TR is vertically higher than LM without contact. As for ON, the highest schema is that LM supports TR. "Support" is a naive concept. By supporting, weight of an object presses or pulls upon another, the supporting objectthen resists the push or pull. The prototypical schema for ON is the sense that TR is contiguous with LM and supported by it. OVER is semantically more complex than ABOVE and ON. Its top schema is that TR is higher than LM along the up axis. It has three sub-schemata: motion sense, stative sense and covering sense. Motion sense is the prototypical schema, in which TR traces a path vertically higher than LM. Stative sense is that TR is vertically higher than LM without contact. Covering sense means that TR covers LM. The covering sense exists both in motion uses and stative uses.The contrastive study of the three prepositions gives us a deeper insight into their meanings. Comparisons are carried out from three angles: prototypes, stative senses and meaning ranges. As for prototypes, ON takes "contact" as a prerequisite; ABOVE necessitates "non-contact" between TR and LM; though OVER contains non-contact in its schema, this can be altered by context. The second angel of comparison is concerned with the stative or dynamic nature of the prepositions. ABOVE and ON are primarily stative in nature, while OVER covers a wider semantic area than stative relations. Therefore, the three are more comparable hi stative senses. With regard to vertical distance between TR and LM, these prepositions can be ordered as ON < OVER < ABOVE from approximation to a long distance. With regard to horizontal distance, horizontal projections of TR and LM related by ON or OVER generally coincide; for ABOVE, they might diverge but not to the extent that horizontal distance becomes cognitively signif...