Meaning Extensions of Grasp: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

By means of a lexico-semantic analysis, the aim of this paper is to provide a clearer picture of how the Eng­lish verb grasp is used in actual language production. The material for the analysis has been gathered from the 100 million word British National Corpus. The results of the study provide new and valuable infor­ma­tion about the character and use of the verb and the­re­by supp­le­ment the information about grasp already existing.

Keywords

• meaning extension
• word meaning
• conceptual mapping
• cognitive linguistics
• corpus linguistics
• usage-based