A Cognitive Study On The Semantic Relatedness Of Preposition Over In Academic Texts

Prepositions are few but productive and widely-used in collocations during language use.The polysemy of over has been a hot topic in cognitive linguistics and fruitful researches have been made.However,there is still space for research on semantic relatedness of preposition over.Under the theoretical guidance of Principled Polysemy Model(PPM)by Tyler and Evans(2003),1000 academic texts randomly extracted from British National Corpus(BNC)are taken as research materials to study questions including:(1)what the primary sense,the distinct senses and on-line meanings of preposition over are in academic texts,together with their distributions;(2)the semantic relatedness among the primary sense,distinct senses and on-line meanings of over in academic texts;(3)the characteristics of semantic relatedness of over in academic texts.Samples of over are processed by PowerConc 1.0 to carry out both quantitative analysis on the senses and meanings of over and qualitative analysis on their semantic relatedness in academic texts.And conclusions are drawn as follows:Firstly,under the PPM,the primary sense of preposition over in academic texts is higher than(within potential contact to the LM);and 10 distinct senses,such as on-the-other-side-of,above-and-beyond,temporal,are found.Besides,8 on-line meanings are observed in research materials including in addition to,along,by way of and so on.As to their distributions,the primary sense of preposition over only occurs 13 times.With reference to distinct senses,the temporal sense occurs most frequently for 228 times,which is followed by the senses of more,focus-of-attention and control in numbers 168,165 and 118.While the on-line meanings of throughout & all over and prior occur more frequently for 28 and 25 times.Secondly,the semantic relatedness among senses and meanings of over is the connections or similarities on TRs,LMs and Vantage point during the transformations of scenes construed by each sense or meaning.And it remains two levels: one is shown by similarities in contextual co-occurrences of related senses or meanings;the other generates in complex conceptualization of language users.The types of semantic relatedness include pragmatic strengthening,contextual similarities and experiential correlations.Finally,with the help of PowerConc 1.0,the semantic relatedness of preposition over in academic texts shows some characteristics: 1)above all,the semantic relatedness is highly dependent on context,i.e.co-occurrences with over.2)by setting the threshold of Concordance of co-occurrences of over,the shorter the length of co-occurrences beside over,the higher the degree of semantic relatedness;vice versa;3)in addition,senses in the same semantic cluster show a higher degree of associations among one or another based on pragmatic strengthening;4)besides,the relatedness between distinct senses and on-line meanings lies greatly in contextual co-occurrences in academic texts.Some implications are indicated in the study.Theoretically,this study further tries to provide some hints on dealing with certain unsolved problems in PPM.Practically,first,the mechanism for meaning interpretation via corpus,attempted to made by the study,can be used to study semantics of other prepositions;second,some insights are provided for English lexical teaching and autonomous learning via corpus and concordancer.