Establishing the prototypical sense
Recall that Tyler and Evans argue that the central sense of over is the ABOVE sense. In this section, we look at the criteria Tyler and Evans provide for establishing the central sense of a polysemous lexical item. These relate to four types of linguistic evidence (listed below) that Tyler and Evans suggest can be relied upon to provide a more objective means of selecting a central sense. Taken together, these criteria form a substantial body of evidence pointing to one sense from which other senses may have been extended.
1. earliest attested meaning;
2. predominance in the semantic network;
3. relations to other prepositions;
4. ease of predicting sense extensions.
We examine each of these criteria in turn. To begin with, given the very stable nature of spatial expressions within a language (prepositions represent a closed class), one likely candidate for the central sense is the historically earliest sense. Moreover, unlike other word classes, the earliest attested sense for many prepositions is still an active component of the synchronic semantic network. For example, overis related to the Sanskrit upan ‘higher’ as well as the Old Teutonic comparative form ufa ‘above’, representing in both cases a spatial configuration in which the TR is higher than the LM. This historical evidence points to the ABOVE meaning as the central sense.
The second criterion relates to predominance within a semantic network. This criterion holds that the central sense will be the one most frequently involved in or related to the other distinct senses. For example, by applying the two criteria discussed in the previous section, Tyler and Evans (2003) identified fifteen distinct senses associated with over. Of these, eight directly involve the location of the TR ABOVE the LM; four involve a TR located ON THE OTHER SIDE OF the LM relative to the vantage point; one involves occlusion (COVER ING); two (REFLEXIVE and REPETITION) involve a multiple TR-LM configuration: a situation in which there is more than one TR and/or LM; and one involves temporal ‘passage’. The criterion of predominance therefore suggests that the central sense for over is the ABOVE sense.
The third criterion concerns relations to other prepositions. Within the entire group of English prepositions, certain clusters of prepositions appear to form contrast sets that divide up various spatial dimensions. For example, above, over, under and below form a compositional set that divides the vertical dimension into four related subspaces, as illustrated in Figure 10.13. As this diagram shows, over and under tend to refer to those subspaces along the vertical axis that are physically closer to the LM, while above and below tend to designate relations in which the TR is further away from the LM. In Figure 10.13, the bold horizontal line refers to the LM while the dotted lines refer to areas of vertical space higher and lower than the LM which count as proximal. The dark circles represent TRs in each subspace corresponding to the prepositions listed on the left of the diagram.
Evidence for the proximity distinction comes from the fact that sentences relating to an unspecified region higher than the LM appear to be less natural with over but more natural with above (for example, compare The birds are somewhere above us? with The birds are somewhere over us). To a large extent, the lexical item assigned to designate a particular TR-LM configuration is determined by how it contrasts with other members of the set. For example, what we label as over is partially determined by what we label as under. The sense used in the formation of such a contrast set would thus seem a likely candidate for a primary sense. For over, the sense that distinguishes this preposition from above, under and below relates to a TR located ABOVE but in proximity to the LM. This criterion therefore also suggests that the ABOVE sense is central.
Finally, the fourth criterion relates to the ease with which sense extensions can be predicted from a given sense: the greater the ease of prediction, the more central the sense. Because the central sense is likely to be the sense from which the other senses in the semantic network have derived diachronically, it seems likely that the central sense should be the best predictor of other senses in the network.
The approach to establishing the central sense proposed by Tyler and Evans differs markedly from the approach proposed by Lakoff. Rather than assuming an idealised composite image schema as Lakoff does, Tyler and Evans provide a number of distinct criteria that can be applied to other prepositions, providing empirically testable predictions and a methodology that can be replicated.
Finally, it is important to point out that in Tyler and Evans’s theory, the central sense for a preposition such as over is directly grounded in a specific kind of recurring spatial scene. This spatial scene, which relates a TR and an LM in a particular spatio-geometric configuration, is called the proto-scene. While the proto-scene is a type of image schema, it is distinct from the central image schema proposed by Lakoff becuase it relates to a distinct and discrete spatial scene. The proto-scene for over is illustrated in Figure 10.14. The small circle represents the TR and the unbroken line the LM. The fact that the TR is located above the LM indicates that the spatio-geometric relation involves a ‘higher-than’ or ABOVE relation. The dashed line indicates that the TR must be within a region proximal to the LM.
