The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meanings, and Cognition (review)

Recent years have witnessed a surging interest in prepositions by cognitive linguists. Scholars in this new tradition seem to agree that the plethora of senses of prepositions, such as over, have their origins in spatiality: a preposition is believed to designate a spatial relation originally, which is then extended into other, nonspatial senses. But how can one explain the ways in which senses in this complex web are related? This is the question investigated by Andrea Tyler and Vyvyan Evans in this volume.

The authors’ major claim is that we humans segment our perceptions of the world and the way in which we experience it into spatial scenes. Each spatial scene represents a particular relationship between two entities, resulting in a number of meaningful concepts in our mind. Such an originally spatio-physical concept, in turn, is systematically extended to nonphysical domains. Prepositions, the authors’ subject of study, can be conveniently accounted for in this cognitive-experiential framework. Each of them is believed to code a unique spatial scene, with its corresponding concepts. The extension of these concepts would then develop into a multitude of senses.

This general claim, strictly speaking, is not new; noted works such as George’s Lakoff’s Women, fire, and dangerous things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Claudia Brugmann’s The story of over (New York: Garland Press, 1988) have advanced similar theses. Even traditional grammarians have long recognized the centrality of spatiality in the semantics of prepositions. What is new and significant, however, is the authors’ methodology. Given that a typical preposition has many senses, how can one decide (i) which of these senses is its primary—or proto—sense, and (ii) whether a particular sense is distinct from any other sense. For the first question, the authors propose that the primary sense must meet some of the following criteria: (i) earliest attested meaning, (ii) predominance in the semantic network, (iii) use in composite forms, (iv) relation to other spatial particles, and (v) grammatical predictions. For the second question, the authors posit that in order for a sense to count as distinct, it must contain additional meaning not apparent in any other senses and there must be instances of the sense that are context-independent.

Much of this spirit of principled polysemy is seen in the discussion of over. First, the authors posit a proto-scene for the particle: the trajector (TR) is higher than but within potential contact of the landmark (LM). The notion of potential contact in turn gives rise to the preposition’s functional element: that the TR and the LM are within each other’s sphere of influence. This is nicely illustrated by 1, which is marginally acceptable because the TR, the birds, and the LM, us, do not seem to be able to influence each other.

(1) ?The birds are somewhere over us.

Then the authors take their readers through a lucid discussion about how this proto-scene has led to fifteen distinct senses of over, some of which form clusters of senses. Take the A-B-C cluster for instance, exemplified in 2.

(2) The cat jumps over the wall.

The trajectory of the cat’s jumping is arc-shaped: the cat starts from one side of the wall (point A), reaches the highest position which is higher than the wall (point B), and lands on the other side of the wall (point C). Contrary to Lakoff’s claim, over does not have the path (above-and-across) sense. Instead, the path sense comes from our real-world knowledge about jumping—when something jumps, it does not stay in mid-air forever due to gravity. Therefore, this sense has become distinct for over through repeated use and, in turn, has given rise to other senses. Consider 3, in which over has the on-the-other-side-of sense.

(3) Arlington is over the Potomac River from...