Beschreibung
Since the rise of Cognitive Linguistics, prepositional polysemy has become a heated topic and invited treatments of a great number of cognitive linguists. Among them, Tyler and Evans (2003) have been holding sway with their Principled Polysemy Model, in which they develop a more constrained semantic network for over. The present study is a critique of this model. By revisiting some typical examples among the 14 postulated additional senses of over, it is revealed that it exhibits three flaws:(1) a misleading premise, which regards meanings that come about on the basis of the preposition over and other words as the basic meaning of over;(2) assuming still redundant and erroneous polysemy for over;(3) frequent mismatched examples. This study suggests a minimal polysemy approach and reveals the significance of tracing back to the nature of prepositional meanings in probing into prepositional polysemy.
Autorenporträt
Qingkai Ma received his Master degree in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics in Foreign Languages from Zhejiang University, China, and is currently a lecturer in Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University. His current research interests include cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis and their integration.
