Formalizing spatial-causal polysemy of Agent prepositions

• Published in: Semantics and pragmatics Vol. 17; no. 4
• Main Authors: Staps, Camil, Rooryck, Johan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington Linguistic Society of America 01.01.2024
• Subjects: Cognitive linguistics; Context; French language; Homonyms; Meaning; Polysemy; Prepositions; Semantics; Syntax
• DOI: 10.3765/sp.17.4
• ISSN: 1937-8912

Current formal approaches to by-phrases in passives analyze the Agent preposition by as semantically vacuous: the denotation of by is merely such that its argument fulfills the same function as the external argument in the corresponding active sentence. This leads to a view of agentive by as essentially homonymous with spatial and temporal by. We argue, on the basis of work in the cognitive linguistic tradition and a new analysis of the French Agent prepositions par and de, that Agent markers do have non-trivial semantic content, and are polysemous rather than homonymous with their spatial counterparts. To formalize this we propose to model these prepositions with general schematic denotations of a polymorphic type ⟨η,⟨θ,t⟩⟩, which can be instantiated with a concrete type in a specific syntactic and semantic context, such as ⟨e,⟨e,t⟩⟩ for the spatial meaning of by. The use as an Agent preposition is simply one of these instantiations, with type ⟨e,⟨s,t⟩⟩, where s stands for events). The concrete meaning in context depends on both the general, polymorphically typed denotation and the specific type in the given context. In this way our proposal integrates a useful insight from cognitive linguistics in a semantic formalization of the passive, and opens up possibilities for similar accounts of other highly grammaticalized prepositions.