Abstract
The goal of this paper is to investigate the polysemy of Spanish spatial prepositions (a, en, hacia, among others), and offer a syntactic and semantic treatment of this phenomenon. The core idea behind this account is that these prepositions can denote sets of possible locations that are involved in spatial relations. Consequently, the compositional interaction of polysemous prepositions with other parts of speech can determine which specific sense emerges in a sentence. The analysis is couched in a Type-Logical Grammar approach. It addresses data that have not previously been analysed in the literature, involving so-called Boolean constructions (e.g. en la estación y la calle). Also, the paper shows that a single treatment can capture all the relevant data. Therefore, the analysis shows that polysemy is a grammar phenomenon that is better accounted for in architectures with a distinct syntactic/derivational component (e.g. Distributed Morphology), than in architectures lacking this component (e.g. Cognitive Linguistics approaches). Consequences for a theory of grammar are discussed.
Highlights
Polysemy is standardly defined as the ability of a lexical item to have several related senses (e.g. Riemer 2005: ch. 3)
Its input type ⊔p determines its point of attachment. It merges with enfrente, which becomes its specifier argument via associativity, forming a phrase which is the complement of a Deg phrase
The mapping we propose captures the intuition found in TLS that, once we can derive a-syntactic structure via a logical proof system, we can directly derive its interpretation in a model of discourse
Summary
Polysemy is standardly defined as the ability of a lexical item to have several related senses (e.g. Riemer 2005: ch. 3). According to Searle (1979), if polysemy arises via conversational implicatures, it is a pragmatic, post-linguistic phenomenon Modern formal analyses such as GL and TLC, instead, treat polysemy as a purely linguistic phenomenon, by attributing multiple related senses to a single lexical item. En seems to have distinct possible senses (“inclusion”, “projection”), based on the other lexical items it distributes with Very thorough, these two works cover only part of the data and diagnostics that identify polysemous items. In order to shed some initial light, we introduce two variants of the first zeugma test, our key choice for the testing of polysemy in SSPs. In the first variant, a coordinated phrase includes two conjuncts headed by the same lexical item (i.e. en in (7)). We present previous accounts of SSPs and polysemy, thereby motivating the need for our analysis of the data (section 2.2)
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