A Cognitive Grammar Approach to the Usage Pattern of the Spatial Particle Up
Among the spatial particles in English, up is of optimal significance not only for
its semantic opacity but also for its productivity (Dehe 2002; Rudzka-Ostyn 2003).
Previous studies (Boers 1994; Cappelle 2005; Hampe 2005; Lindner 1983;
Lindstromberg 1997; Tyler and Evans 2003) approach the usage of up from a variety
of theoretical and methodological standpoints and have made contributions in
different aspects. However, the relation between the semantic patterns of up and its
co-text in VPCs has not been systematically studied. In order to investigate how the
semantics of up patterns with its co-text in VPCs, we compile a corpus and manually
look into the corpus to generalize the constructional schemas (Langacker 1991, 2008)
that are associated with each cluster of meaning.
In our corpus, three major clusters of meanings are identified: ‘vertically higher’,
‘approaching’ and ‘completion’, and each cluster of usage exhibits a distinct pattern in
terms of grammatical behavior or of concept elaboration (Evans 2004, 2005). We
further find that the distinction between the three senses not only is reflected by
different schematic patterning of co-text but is also image-schematic (Johnson 1987;
Lakoff 1987) in nature.
We in addition find at least four other senses that involve another conceptual
domain other than SPACE: ‘happy’, ‘accessible’, ‘more’ and ‘good’. We will discuss
the relations between the four meanings and their co-text based on the connection
proposed by Croft (1993) between conceptual autonomy and domain mapping. Based
on Croft’s insight we will explore the source of concept elaboration for the above four
senses.
The finding so far reveals that the above two major groups exhibit different
mechanisms of meaning extension from the prototypical sense: image-schematic
transformation and metaphorical mapping. However, overlap of semantic categories
and cross-cutting semantic boundaries suggest that the two mechanisms operate not in
a mutually exclusive manner but on a collaborative basis. The result also suggests that
a linguistic description based on constructional schemas may facilitate identification
of connections between senses for a lexical item.