An Outline of the Semantic Network of the Preposition Up in American English : A Corpus Study

Sammanfattning: In this study an outline is presented of the semantic network of the preposition up in American English in sentences extracted from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), which was done to determine what the most common uses and meanings of the preposition are, as well as to determine if most of its possible meanings are concrete or abstract. The results show that there is a salient use and also prototypical meaning of up, and that these are major factors that impact the semantic network of the preposition. This study was designed to be a source of information for EFL students who struggle to understand how prepositions function in the English language, and also what the prepositions can actually represent in a sentence. Concomitantly, the goal is to give information about the preposition up in a way that will allow students to analyze other prepositions and perhaps even other word classes.