Through the prototypes of through: A corpus-based cognitive analysis

This paper empirically tests a number of criteria proposed in the literature to identify the prototype of a linguistic category in order to see how they compare with each other – and what this can tell us about the concept of prototypicality. The item under investigation is through, and the starting point is an intuition-based definition of prototypical through. The different criteria are frequency of use, ease of elicitation, historical origin, patterns in L1 acquisition and patterns in L2 use. All instances of through retrieved for testing each of these criteria are classified according to a taxonomy couched in Construction Grammar terms. The findings confirm the special status of the intuition-based prototype of through (the [X moves through Y] construction) according to some of the criteria, but also reveal divergent results, in particular a central use of the instrumental prepositional phrase with through. Conclusions are drawn about the theoretical concept of prototypicality and its possible multi-faceted nature, and more generally about the place of empirical evidence in Cognitive Linguistics