On the Meaning of <em>on/ant</em>: How Relevant is the Concept of Contact?

Abstract

The paper sets out to examine the relevance of the concept of ‘contact’ and/or ‘(the top of) the surface’ in the explication of the meaning of on in English and ant in Lithuanian. The investigation of a corpus of English and Lithuanian data revealed that the term is largely superfluous and imprecise, also in many cases a result of interpreting larger strings of context and an outcome of realising the overriding concept of ‘support’, underlying the prototypical meaning of on and ant.