Abstract
It has been observed that cross-linguistically the core posture verbs ‘sit’/‘stand/‘lie’ can extend their meaning beyond the literal sense encoding posture or spatial orientation (see Newman 2002 for an overview). In the cognitive literature, the conceptual background of these extensions has been discussed, but up to now, there has been no discussion of the non-literal senses in the theoretical linguistic literature, including how the different senses are disambiguated. This paper supplements the cognitive descriptions of posture verbs, presenting data from an independent corpus study and proposing a formal analysis. The in-depth investigation of one English posture verb, ‘sit’, yields an empirical generalization that contributes to the discussion surrounding non-literal meaning.
Highlights
It has been observed that cross-linguistically the core posture verbs ‘sit’/ ‘stand’/lie can extend their meaning beyond the literal sense encoding posture or spatial orientation
For the literal use in (1-a) to be felicitous, the human subject must be at-rest, in a “relatively compact position” (Newman 2002: 2; cp. “elongated position”, either vertical or horizontal, for ‘stand’ or ‘lie’), her upper body must be vertical, and her buttocks must be located on the flat part of the bench
Posture verbs have been observed to be polysemous, non-literal uses have been largely ignored in the theoretical linguistic literature
Summary
It has been observed that cross-linguistically the core posture verbs ‘sit’/ ‘stand’/lie can extend their meaning beyond the literal sense encoding posture or spatial orientation (see Newman 2002 for an overview). The stative meaning of ‘sit’ in its literal sense is ‘to be in a sitting position (at location z)’, like the human subject in (1-a). The meaning in the non-literal sense is ‘to be at z’, like the inanimate subject in (1-b).. Posture verbs have been observed to be polysemous, non-literal uses have been largely ignored in the theoretical linguistic literature. The current study builds upon these findings, and examines the complex lexical semantics of one English posture verb, ‘sit’. (2) is a naturally-occurring example of the use of ‘sit’ under investigation; the relevant predicate is boldfaced
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