English prepositions are complex. Not only are they used to refer to a wide variety of static spatial scenes like a book on a table, a fly on a ceiling, and a ring on a finger, they are also used to refer to more abstract relationships. It is not uncommon to hear people talk about someone being on duty, on vacation, or on social security. What is most striking, however, is that native speakers of English find it completely natural to use a single term for all of these disparate uses. The question, then, is how to best account for the fact that such a wide variety of senses are associated with a single lexical item.
Previous attempts to account for these various uses have tended to operate under the assumption that concrete spatial uses serve as the conceptual basis for more abstract uses. However, these analyses fail to take into account existent experimental evidence regarding concrete spatial uses of these terms. As a result, they are unable to provide a motivated account of the connections between concrete and abstract uses. To fill this gap in the literature, this research has two general aims: first, to test the assumption that the meanings associated with the metaphorical uses of locative terms are extended from the meanings associated with more spatially-based uses, and second, to account for the connections between concrete and abstract uses in a psychologically valid way.