Persistence of spatial meanings in the conceptualization of causality: at, by, with and about in emotion constructions

Abstract

Abstract Prepositions encode various causal forces when expressing emotion causality in emotion constructions. This study investigates two pairs of prepositions, the zerodimensional at and by, and the two- or three-dimensional with and about, which show contrasting collocation patterns in emotion constructions. Through a corpus analysis of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, this study claims that there is a strong tendency that zero-dimensional prepositions are used with short-term emotions, whereas two- or three-dimensional prepositions frequently occur with long-term emotions. This study argues that the constraints of distributions of prepositions with emotive adjectives can be accounted for by features of their spatial source meanings in early usages. In the framework of grammaticalization, the constraints of collocation patterns of two pairs of prepositions with emotive adjectives show the phenomenon with respect to the “persistence” of Hopper (1991) in which traces of the source lexemes are retained in the constraints of their distributions. This study is significant in that it suggests a typology of causality based on spatial dimensions of prepositions.