PREPOSITIONS SHAPE FRAMES FOR ABSTRACT EVENTS:
A QUANTITATIVE STUDY OF SPATIAL-TO-ABSTRACT
MAPPING IN ENGLISH SCIENCE WRITING
PREPOSITIONS SHAPE FRAMES FOR ABSTRACT EVENTS:
A QUANTITATIVE STUDY OF SPATIAL-TO-ABSTRACT
MAPPING IN ENGLISH SCIENCE WRITING
Author(s): Christoph HaaseSubject(s): Cognitive linguistics, Methodology and research technology
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: corpora; academic English; prepositions; metaphor; cognitive linguistics; conceptualisation; spatial; popular science; image schema; abstractness;
Summary/Abstract: Adpositions form closed lexical classes in English which provide cognitive access to representations of complex scenes and events. In academic texts from the domain of natural sciences, these lexical items help build conceptualisations of abstract relationships between phenomena that cannot be perceived directly. As a consequence, any phenomenon that can be hypothesised or measured in the natural sciences can be mediated and transferred into comprehensible processes via linguistic markers by way of “experiential correlation” and subsequent metaphorical extension. This extension is systematically grammaticalised in prepositional phrases.
Journal: Discourse and Interaction
- Issue Year: 2/2009
- Issue No: 2
- Page Range: 23-34
- Page Count: 12
- Language: English