Perception of Schematic Structures of Prepositions in Adjectival Constructions:An Experimental Approach

Abstract

Grammatical concepts are developed from basic propositional structures called event schemas (Heine 1993, 30; ‘syntactic frames’ or ‘abstract instrumental scripts’ of Schank and Abelson 1977, Sanford 1985, 200; ‘schematic meanings’ in the present study). This study argued that the concept of causality came from schematic meanings. This study has examined this claim with an experiment in which participants were guided to rate relations of the schematic meanings to six prepositions. The results showed that, despite a few exceptions, it appears there is a salient schematic meaning that affects native speakers’ choices, when they were asked to distinguish the particular preposition from those of the others in adjectival constructions. This showed which schematic meaning best indicates native speakers’ understanding of emotion causality of each preposition among the schematic meanings of six prepositions. This study empirically demonstrates that schematic meanings enable English native speakers to distinguish different prepositions in their mental lexicons, thus motivating their conceptualization of causality.