A cognitive study of the synonymy, antonymy and polysemy of English prepositions: With special reference to linguistic embodiment

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26770171
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: English linguistics
• Research Institution: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (2015-2017); Kyoto Prefectural University (2014)
• Principal Investigator: Otani Naoki 東京外国語大学, 大学院総合国際学研究院, 講師 (50549996)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: 前置詞 / 多義性 / 文法化 / 構文 / コーパス / 動機づけ

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This project focuses on the basic lexical relations of English prepositions, which has been studied in the field of cognitive linguistics from its inception. The achievements of the projects can be summarized as follows: First, this project described the polysemous nature of prepositions and basic lexical relations among prepositions in terms of linguistic embodiment. Its results are used for writing the dictionary entries of prepositions in an English Japanese dictionary. Second, this project proposed a corpus-based method to describe the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of prepositions, and then, tried to improve the methodology. Third, by focusing on linguistic embodiment, this project revealed that various types of grammatical and discourse functions are entrenched in a large number of prepositions, which emerge through our body experience.

Free Research Field

認知言語学、構文文法、コーパス言語学