Eugene Chung. 2014. Verification of Polysemous Spatial Prepositions ― ON . Language Information. Volume 19. 167-188. The meaning expressed by a spatial preposition indicates how its arguments physically relate to each other in space in English. The locations assigned by the spatial preposition on as in ‘We saw a boat on the lake’ and ‘John has a cabin on the lake’ are a surface and a side of the reference objects, respectively. The first example gives us an image that a boat is floating on the lake, but the second causes us to imagine that a cabin is near the edge of the lake. The same prepositional phrase can be used to represent different locations in these examples. Expressions containing prepositional phrases representing spatial relations such as inclusion, contact, or contiguity are prime examples of spatial expressions. This work is concerned with the semantic study of spatial expressions to identify what kinds of spatial relationships are represented via a spatial preposition. In addition, how can the same preposition represent different spatial configurations? Is it a case of ambiguity, or of generality of meaning? To find out answers of these issues, first, this study presents various spatial configurations represented by the same spatial preposition. Two main approaches are devoted to representing spatial prepositions: a monosemy-based approach (Bennett 1975; Cooper 1968; Leech 1969; Lindner 1981; Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976) and a polysemy-based approach (Brugman 1988; Brugman and Lakoff 1988; Hawkins 1984; Herskovits 1986; Vandeloise 1991). Second, this study employs zeugma to verify that different configurations of a spatial preposition have sufficient privileges to belong to a polysemy; or they are simply due to vagueness or indeterminacy. The study presents standard ambiguity tests that are used to confirm if the lexical items are really ambiguous or not; then it describes the way of meaning extension.
Key words: spatial prepositions, spatial configuration, monosemy, polysemy, ambiguity test, zeugma