The Schematic Organisation of Irish Prepositions

Abstract

The image schema model proposes that basic sensory-motor concepts are the prelinguistic building blocks upon which more abstract concepts are grown. Spatial particles such as prepositions encode basic information linked to embodied human experience and tend to be highly polysemous, existing in both basic and abstract domains of experience. They are therefore useful for studying the schematic properties of language across different conceptual domains, and for understanding how abstract concepts are grounded in basic experiential knowledge. In this paper we demonstrate the usefulness of an image schema approach to the analysis of Irish prepositions, illustrating how the radial structure organisation of polysemous meaning senses schematically links basic perceptual concepts with non-perceptual abstract concepts. We thus argue that the image schema model illustrates the fundamental grounding of language in sensory-motor concepts, and how our understanding of abstract concepts is possible only as a result of the embodied nature of the human mind. List of Abbreviations 1sg: 1 person singular, 1pl: 1 person plural, 3pl:, 3 person plural, acc: accusative, ADJ: adjective, ADV: adverb, CON: conjugator, COND: conditional, dat: dative, DEM: demonstrative particle, DET: determiner, em: emphatic suffix, gen: genitive, IMPS: impersonal passive, INT: interrogative pronoun, NEG: negative verb particle, nom: nominative, NP: noun phrase, pl: plural, PN: pronoun, POS: possessive adjective, PP: prepositional phrase, PPc: compound preposition, PR: present tense, PT: past tense, VN: verbal noun 1. Image Schemas and the Embodied Mind The image schema concept was introduced simultaneously by Mark Johnson (1987) and George Lakoff (1987) in order to explain how the embodied human mind is able to understand and reason abstractly. Now one of the central concepts in the field of Cognitive Linguistics, the image schema model proposes that basic concepts are organised schematically across languages because they are common to our basic embodied human experiences. It enables us to see how more abstract concepts are ‘grown’ from concepts that are common to our sensory-motor experiences, and how the basic and abstract concepts are schematically linked via metaphorical and polysemous radial structures, which underpin and organise the lexicon. Prepositions tend to be highly polysemous in nature and so are particularly suitable for examining the schematic nature of spatial concepts across basic and abstract domains. In this paper we draw on our image schema analysis of an Irish prepositional corpus (Manning, 2009) to illustrate how abstract concepts in Irish are grounded in experientially basic ones, and furthermore how the perceptual and metaphorical meaning senses of polysemous Irish prepositions, are connected radially from central basic senses to extended abstract senses. In section 2 we define image schemas for the purpose of our analysis, and specify two other types of schema, the response schema and the focus schema, which will be relevant for our investigation of Irish prepositions. We then show how the image schema model is used to provide a unified account of polysemous prepositional