Transformations on image schemas and cross-linguistic polysemy

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so well integrated in the mind of the language user that it does not give rise to polysemy, perhaps not even vagueness. (5) all people (MX) / all gold (MS) (6) to spread leaflets (MX) / to spread manure (MS) The third example is taken from another article of Dewell, (1997), where he introduces the notion of construal transformations, accounting for subjective shifts of viewpoint of a given scene. Consider the sentence (7) Lucy ran through the house. According to Dewell (1997: 25), the prepositional phrase, through the house, is polysemous due to various possibilities to construe the LM (the house). Adopting an external vantage point, through only denotes Lucy’s entering and emerging from the house, whereas her passing through the inside of the house is implied. The second option is to shift from an external to an internal viewpoint (to be able to follow Lucy’s way inside the house) and then back to an external viewpoint, to watch her emerging out of the house. Thirdly, we may adopt an exclusively internal viewpoint on the house, in which case the outer boundaries are irrelevant for the interpretation of through. Assuming that through is vague as to the location of the endpoints of the path, the internal-viewpoint transformation imposes different, more detailed interpretations of the prepositional phrase, which then is regarded polysemous. As Dewell (p. 25) puts it, “[t]he polysemy is not exactly “located” in either the preposition or the LM, but it arises from their syntactic combination under a particular pragmatic construal of the LM”. However, this extension of the notion of polysemy is not justified without support from psycho-linguistic tests. As Sandra (1998) strongly emphasizes, intuition is insufficient when it comes to delimit the boundaries between polysemous senses and variants of a monosemous sense. (See also Tuggy (1993) for a discussion of the boundaries between ambiguity (homonomy), polysemy and vagueness.) With this reservation in mind, we turn back to the role of image schema transformations in the generation of new senses. The question to be answered is: 32
Given a specific image schema, is it possible to account for so-called motivated polysemy? I will argue that it is. If transformations of image schemas are analogs of spatial operations, such as manipulations of physical objects (see Johnson 1987, and cited research), it should be possible to predict which transformations a specific schema may undergo. In the remainder of the paper I will elaborate this argument by illustrating how transformations of the image schemas of Spatial association (Fig. 1) may generate polysemy that is cross- linguistically realized. The image schema Spatial association instantiates the basic conceptual relation of association (ASSOC) (Langacker 1987: 225). It can be regarded as a superordinate schema, embracing a variety of relational predicates encoded as prepositions, adverbs, and verbs, in turn based on various subordinate schemas. Thus the schema Spatial association does not underlie any specific lexical concept but rather generates the image schemas structuring lexical concepts. 4 Lexemes denoting spatial association in its central sense are e.g. at, with, together, between, near, follow; thus on an abstract level these lexemes are all related via the schema in Fig. 1 (adopted from Langacker 1987: 230). (A and B are equal to TR and LM, whereas C is a construed, primarily spatial, region including A and B; cf. He stood near the house where C is defined as a region within the visual field including TR and LM.) A B C Fig. 1. Spatial association. Given the spatial proximity of two entities, there is a range of possible ways of orientation of the two. Adding a front and a back to the entities they will canonically be oriented face-to-face, as illustrated in Fig. 2 (Clark 1973, 4 The schema Spatial association shows striking similarities with what Hawkins (1993) names “a profilable structure”, a primitive cognitive structure which “exists innately in the human mind before the process begins of acquiring substantive information in particular cognitive domains” (Hawkins 1993: 339). 33
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Transformations on image schemas and cross-linguistic polysemy

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