Spatial Experience, Lexical Structure and Motivation: The Case of In

// In G. Radden and K. Panther. Studies in Linguistic Motivation. — Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. — pp. 157-192.This paper takes issue with the received view of lexical structure, which views the lexicon as being the repository of the arbitrary and the idiosyncratic. It is argued that the lexicon is systematically motivated. The traditional view of the lexicon is shown to be inadequate in three ways. These relate to the fact that a word can take on new meanings in novel contexts, that words tend to be polysemous, and that a single word can appear in a range of different lexical classes. A case study of in is presented to illustrate the issues at hand.