Metaphorical and non-metaphorical meaning from spatial relations

Abstract

Abstract Speakers regularly use their experiences of spatial relations to construe linguistic meaning in metaphorical and non-metaphorical ways. Still, we have yet to identify the meaning-bearing functions that different spatial relations commonly serve. This paper focuses on into relations. Using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, we apply an Embodied Scenes approach to identify the categories of concepts that are regularly construed with ‘into relations’1 and the actions that are commonly involved. More generally, we aim to show how spatial metaphors can be systematically studied by investigating the collocates of prepositions and prepositional constructions.