Chapter published in:
Constructing Families of Constructions: Analytical perspectives and theoretical challenges
Edited by Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Alba Luzondo Oyón and Paula Pérez-Sobrino
[Human Cognitive Processing 58] 2017
► pp. 53–76

Chapter 2
Embodied motivations for abstract in and on constructions

| Umeå University

This chapter investigates the relationship between abstract in and on constructions (i.e. grammatical form and meaning pairings (Langacker 1987: 409; Goldberg 2006: 3) and body-world knowledge. Abstract in and on instances retrieved from the British National Corpus (BNC) are analyzed to identify what types of abstract concepts are construed as containing entities (used with the English preposition/particle in) and what types of abstract concepts are construed as objects/supporting surfaces (used with the preposition/particle on). Analyses show that abstract in and on constructions fall into families of constructions that refer to related concepts, and that these, in turn, are connected with specific types of embodied experiences. Body-world knowledge thus provides a principled way of explaining the constructions.

Keywords: abstract concepts, prepositions, particles, body-world knowledge, English
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Cognitive linguistics approaches to abstract in and on
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Abstract in and on concepts
  • 5.Embodied motivations for abstract in constructions
  • 6.Embodied motivations for abstract on constructions
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 26 July 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.58.03joh
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