| Resumen: |
This thesis' main research goal is to provide an account of the English posture verb sit, from a synchronic a diachronic perspective. My proposed account of sit comprises various components, including a characterisation of the different possible meanings of sit and a comparison with stand and lie. The two relevant meanings are a literal one and non-literal one (The girl is sitting on the chair vs. The wine bottle is sitting on the chair; in the former the subject is described to be in a sitting position, while in the latter the subject is not in a sitting position). I analyse each meaning/use separately, noting which semantic patterns occur with one type only and those which occur with both. I argue that the non-literal use is diachronically connected to the literal one, and I motivate this claim based on the shared components identified in the thesis and on data from corpus studies reported in the thesis. A consequence of acknowledging a divide between the literal and non-literal uses---a perspective not usually taken in theoretical linguistics---is that I am able to account for important semantic details which might be otherwise overlooked. The cognitive and typological literature includes account of posture verbs cross-linguistically, but in the theoretical literature these verbs have not received much attention. In this thesis, I review existing proposals and highlight the uncertainties surrounding the posture verbs. In order to fillthese gaps in the literature and to better understand the phenomena, I analyse data from synchronic and diachronic corpus studies, and incorporate these insights into my account of sit
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