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- Title
COMPARING FORCE PREPOSITIONS WITH SPATIAL PREPOSITIONS.
- Authors
Gärdenfors, Peter; University
- Abstract
The traditional semantic approach to prepositions is that they express spatial relations. In this article, I criticize this 'localist' position by arguing that many prepositions build on forces as their primary semantic domain. I compare prepositions that depend on the force domain to those that depend on the spatial domain. I argue that most typical uses of the prepositions 'over', 'on' and 'in' depend on the force domain, in contrast to 'above', 'on top of' and 'inside' that are corresponding spatial prepositions. Also 'against', 'under', and 'at' have force related meanings. My analysis of English is compared with some examples from Bulgarian and other languages. I propose a rotation test for determining the primary domain of a preposition. This test states that if the use of a preposition for a particular relation between the trajectory and the landmark is invariant under rotation, then the meaning of the preposition is non-spatial.
- Subjects
PREPOSITIONS; SEMANTICS; ENGLISH language; BULGARIAN language; LINGUISTICS
- Publication
Lyuboslovie, 2020, Issue 20, p92
- ISSN
1314-6033
- Publication type
Article