Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper is a preliminary analysis from a cognitive linguistics perspective of the meaning of three very high frequency prepositions in English, at, on, and in, which are argued to be inherently polysemous. Although these so-called grammatical morphemes are usually defined in terms of topological relations, the majority of their usages are far too abstract or non-geometric for such spatially-oriented characterizations. Because they seem to sustain a variety of meanings which often overlap, they are exemplary lexical items for testing theories of lexical representation. Arguments against monosemous accounts center on their inability to formulate schemas which include all appropriate usages while excluding usages of other prepositions. Many of the usages differ only on the basis of variable speaker perspective and construal. A polysemic account is currently being developed and tested experimentally in a series of studies involving how native and non-native speakers of English evaluate and categorize various usages of the different prepositions. Initial results indicate that diese naive categorizations reflect a gradient of deviation from a canonical spatial sense. Furthermore, deviant usages tend to form fairly robust clusters consonant with a constrained polysemic analysis.