Treatment of “up”

 

The sense inventory in ODE is a reorganized version of the one in NODE/DIMAP. Both sources have four senses that do not entirely correspond: NODE/DIMAP has one core and three subsenses; ODE has three core and one subsense. I have used the ODE inventory, as usual.

 

Notes from the spreadsheets:

Up is incorporated entirely in the Sense Analysis Summary. No new senses were added, but I slightly expanded some ODE concepts; see brief spreadsheet notes there.

 

 

Other instances of up that may deserve idiomatic treatment

Most of ODE’s phrases are clearly adverbial rather than prepositional uses of up. When used as a verb, up might be mistaken as a preposition in a construction like  up the ante.

 

“up and down” after a verb of motion and with a further complement is usually a hybrid PP, indicating bidirectional motion of a passage of some sort. I have labeled these 3(2), a slight extension of the “street” sense, except where the thing traversed is actually vertical (e.g., “up and down the stairs”) in which case it is 1(1)

 

The idioms “up the garden path” and “up a creek” will probably not yield good results if parsed literally.

 

Other Notes:

The majority of the instances of up in FrameNet are adverbs and phrasal verb particles that are sometimes followed by a PP. Even when the FN tagging indicates an up PP this is true: “come up behind sb,” “hook sth up to a tape recorder,” “haul up the pots,” etc.

 

When adverbial up immediately precedes a location PP its job is mainly to give additional location information that is often colloquial and not semantically required, e.g., “up in the woods” as opposed to “in the woods.” This may argue for simply ignoring up in these contexts, or amalgamating it with the adjacent preposition, i.e., treating up in the same as in.