Word formation processes from a cognitive perspective

Más información sobre el libro

The COLLINS Cambridge International Dictionary of English highlights the meaning of the prefix OVER through a characterization of American troops in Britain during World War II: Overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here. This quote effectively illustrates how OVER in compounds indicates an exceeding of an upper scalar value related to the activity, state, or quality of the second component. Such usages often carry negative connotations due to the perceived exaggeration. Cognitive literature has extensively explored OVER, recognizing it as a highly polysemous category. Our corpus analysis of hapax legomena in the BNC shows that it actively participates in word-formation processes, prompting inquiry into the specific meaning it conveys when combined with other lexemes. We propose that the central sense of OVER as "surmounting an obstacle" underlies its encoding of scalarity, while also restricting similar formations with other prepositions. The negative connotations of OVER+X instances stem from metaphorical mappings based on bodily experiences. Langacker's (1987) valence relations explain the natural compatibility of most adjectives with OVER, where the second component elaborates on a substructure within the first. Our findings support key claims of Cognitive Linguistics regarding the lack of full semantic compositionality and the existence of constraints on linguistic potential, illustrating that while semantics may be moti