Article published In:
Review of Cognitive Linguistics: Online-First ArticlesMetaphorical and non-metaphorical meaning from spatial relations
Speakers regularly use their experiences of spatial relations to construe linguistic meaning in metaphorical and non-metaphorical ways. Still, we have yet to identify the meaning-bearing functions that different spatial relations commonly serve. This paper focuses on into relations. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, we apply an Embodied Scenes approach to identify the categories of concepts that are regularly construed with ‘into relations’ [1] 1 and the actions that are commonly involved. More generally, we aim to show how spatial metaphors can be systematically studied by investigating the collocates of prepositions and prepositional constructions.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Research on spatial constructions
- 3.Method and materials
- 3.1Collection and processing of data
- 4.Analysis and results
- 5.Concepts commonly construed as LMs of ‘into relations’
- 6.‘Actions’ that are commonly part of scenes evoked by ‘into relations’
- 6.1‘Actions’ evoked by general motion verbs
- 6.2‘Actions’ evoked by more specific verbs
- 7.Meanings evoked by into constructions
- 7.1LMs that tend to be construed by non-metaphorical ‘into relations’
- 7.2LMs commonly construed by metaphorical and non-metaphorical ‘into relations’
- 7.3LMs that tend to be construed by metaphorical ‘into relations’
- 8.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
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