'Through' through a Construction Grammar approach to prototypes
(2008) Language, Communication and Cognition Conference — Location: Brighton (4.August.2008)
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- Abstract
- The now traditional approach of dealing with meaning in Cognitive Semantics is to define a category and one or several prototypes and their extensions structuring the set of meanings. Brugman’s (1981) study of the preposition over and Lindner’s (1981) dissertation on up and out have provided a framework for describing these prepositions in terms of structured networks of meanings. This framework has nevertheless been criticised, e.g. Sandra & Rice (1995), and we will go a step further in this paper. The item that will serve as a basis for our study is through, a preposition which has received comparatively little attention among cognitive linguists. Lee (1998: 333), following King (1988: 579), claims that “[t]he preposition through prototypically involves a situation in which a physical object or substance enters a container, follows a path within the container, and then exits”, as illustrated by The train went through the tunnel. This purported prototype is in line with the cognitive view that “our thinking about abstract domains is grounded in our experience of physical space” (Lee 1998: 334), since more abstract senses of the preposition (as in They went through a terrible experience) are seen as deriving from this central, spatial sense. However, Lee’s study, like many others, centres its attention just on the lexeme itself, taking very little notice of the environment surrounding it. As is often the case with radial networks, the syntax and the collocational information only enter the discussion of the semantics in order to obtain a finer-grained definition of the item under study. We would like to argue that the approach to the meaning of a word should start at a higher level than that of the lexeme itself. In the wake of Construction Grammar (see Goldberg 1995), more attention has been given to the meanings of whole syntactic structures and the influence of the meaning of the construction upon the meaning of its constituents. Through a corpus analysis and the identification of a number of constructions containing through, it will be shown that the prototypical meanings ascribed to the preposition might be better organised under construction headings, together with adapting and using the insights provided by a polysemy network of the type suggested e.g. by Lakoff (1987).
- Affiliations
Université Toulouse 2 CNRS
Citations
McMichael, A., & Gilquin, G. (2008). ‘Through’ through a Construction Grammar approach to prototypes. Language, Communication and Cognition Conference, Brighton. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/225578