Polysemous Posture in English: A Case Study of Non-literal Meaning

It has been observed that cross-linguistically the core posture verbs ‘sit’/ ‘stand’/lie can extend their meaning beyond the literal sense encoding pos- ture or spatial orientation (see Newman 2002 for an overview). In the cog- nitive literature, the conceptual background of these extensions has been discussed, but up to now, there has been no discussion of the non-literal senses in the theoretical linguistic literature, including how the different senses are disambiguated. This paper supplements the cognitive descrip- tions of posture verbs, presenting data from an independent corpus study and proposing a formal analysis. The in-depth investigation of one English posture verb, ‘sit’, yields an empirical generalization that contributes to the discussion surrounding non-literal meaning.