Prepositional categories and prototypes: contrasting some Slavic examples

This paper presents a cognitive-oriented analysis that explains the semantic similarity and distinctions between some prepositional uses in Croatian in comparison with the Russian and Polish. The prepositions examined are Croatian na and preko and their approximate equivalents in the other Slavic languages. The analysis was undertaken against the background of treatments of prepositions within the Cognitive Grammar paradigm (Cuyckens 1988, Vandeloise 1991, Deane 1993, Boers 1996). The fact is that prepositional usage varies from language to language, even between historically closely related languages, in an at first sight unpredictable manner. The attention is restricted to some of major senses of the analyzed prepositions concentrating on the similarities and differences between the languages, and attempting to account for the later in terms of different structuring of prepositional categories. We will restrict our attention largely to the spatial uses of prepositions in which they serve to locate an entity (TR) with reference to another entity (LM) within the three-dimensional space. This function can also be profiled by means of adverbs, verbs, case markers etc. We will partly concentrate on the role of case markers in Slavic, which is important in the combination with the preposition in profiling a relation between two entities against a base of physical space, and the regularities of some metaphorical extensions of the meaning of spatial prepositions.

References

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