ONE OF THE MEANINGS OF THE ENGLISH PREPOSITION OVER
Keywords:
preposition over, covering, trajector, landmark, rotated schemasAbstract
This paper analyzes the possibility of pragmatic derivation of the covering meaning assigned to the English preposition over. We show that this meaning of the preposition has been treated as a distinct one by several publications and that it appears in a number of variations depending on the characteristics of the entities that the preposition connects. We demonstrate on several examples that this meaning could be inferred in the course of utterance interpretation. Our starting point is the basic meaning of the preposition proposed by principled polysemy authors. We combine this meaning primarily with the knowledge of the context and the characteristics of the trajector and the landmark. We also accept Lakoff”s view of the change of perspective, i.e. rotated schemas. Thus we arrive at the meaning of covering which is not a distinct node in our semantic memory, but a pragmatically derived meaning.
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