Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The nature of meaning
- 2 Embodied meaning and spatial experience
- 3 Towards a model of principled polysemy: spatial scenes and conceptualization
- 4 The semantic network for over
- 5 The vertical axis
- 6 Spatial particles of orientation
- 7 Bounded landmarks
- 8 Conclusion
- References
- Index
1 - The nature of meaning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Content
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The nature of meaning
- 2 Embodied meaning and spatial experience
- 3 Towards a model of principled polysemy: spatial scenes and conceptualization
- 4 The semantic network for over
- 5 The vertical axis
- 6 Spatial particles of orientation
- 7 Bounded landmarks
- 8 Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
My grandmother was a great one for mixing historical lessons in with child rearing. A favorite, regularly used when one of the grandchildren was being rebuked for failing to satisfactorily complete some minor task and was, consequently, being required to do it overA, involved pointing to the needle-point text hanging overB the sofa which read, ‘We won't come back 'til it's overC, overD there.’ This was inevitably followed by the question, ‘Where would the world be if they hadn't done their jobs properly?’
This text might strike contemporary readers as a little unusual. References to lines from old war songs and needle-pointed mottoes hanging on the wall belong to a bygone era and anecdotes relying on them are likely to be somewhat vague. However, what is even more striking about the text is exactly what typical native speakers of English are likely to find unremarkable, namely the numerous, very different interpretations assigned to the single word, over. In this short text, over has four distinct interpretations – overA can be paraphrased by ‘again’, overB by ‘above’, overC by ‘finished’ and overD by ‘in some other place’. For us, the fundamental question that texts such as the one above raise is whether the various meanings regularly associated with a single word are simply accidental (the fact that over has four very different meanings might, after all, be a bizarre accident), or systematically related.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Semantics of English PrepositionsSpatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning, and Cognition, pp. 1 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003