Student Writers’ Categories of Construals and Sense of the English Preposition on: A cognitive linguistics study

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the categories of construal's and senses of the English preposition 'on' used by Indonesian and American student writers in their master's and doctoral theses and to examine the similarities and differences in their construal's and senses of the preposition. This study was based on the cognitive theory of Tyler and Evans, namely the polysemy of prepositions and the categorizations of construal's and senses were based on Brenda. The method used was primarily qualitative and the data were collected from two sources: The Indonesian data were taken from the library of a private university in Jakarta and the American data from two American websites; all of which were classified into prepositional phrases and clauses using the concordance software Antconc 3.4.1.0 developed by Anthony. Findings indicate that there are more construal's and senses found in American master's and doctoral theses than in Indonesian master's and doctoral theses. This study reveals that some of the categories used for the English preposition 'over' developed by Brenda were suitable for preposition 'on'.