| This dissertation is an investigation of the lexical semantics of English through. My primary purpose is to demonstrate an empirically responsible semantic analysis within the framework of cognitive linguistics (e.g. Croft and Cruse 2004). In order to do so, my analysis is grounded in corpus and cross-linguistic data. As part of the methodological consideration, I describe what I call the 'correctness fallacy', a carryover from folk philosophy that assumes that there is a unique correct answer to every question.; I focus my efforts on two implicit assumptions based on the correctness fallacy. The first is that all uses of a polysemous item must be motivated by exactly one of the item's senses. The second is that lexemes either express a force dynamic configuration (Talmy 2000), or they do not, but does not admit the possibility that there may be a gradation of strength of association.; As part of the analysis, I show that through is polysemous. I take polysemy to refer to a lexeme or construction with multiple senses (categories of meaning) differentiated syntactically and a constrained number and variety of potential relationships holding between the senses. Because my definition of polysemy is grounded in syntax, the senses described in the analysis can be assumed to be cognitively 'real' to language users. A study of three Japanese translational equivalents confirms the 'naturalness' of the analysis of through.; I also undertake nine case studies of corpus data in which qualitative analysis confirms the large number of context types in which a use of through is not clearly assignable to a single sense. In a quantitative study of corpus data, I show that a substantial portion (40%) of the tokens of through in the data set are not clearly motivated by a single primary sense. This is predicted by and supports the hypothesis of underspecification.; Finally, using a corpus-based methodology, I test the hypothesis that through is associated with, or 'suggests', the force dynamic property of resistance. The results strongly support the hypothesis, as well as the claim that force dynamics can be 'suggested', rather than simply denoted, by a lexeme or construction. |
