Using a cognitive linguistics perspective, this book provides a comprehensive, theoretical analysis of the semantics of English prepositions. All English prepositions originally coded spatial relations between two physical entities; while retaining their original meaning, prepositions have also developed a rich set of non-spatial meanings. In this study, Tyler and Evans argue that all these meanings are systematically grounded in the nature of human spatio-physical experience. The original 'spatial scenes' provide the foundation for the extension of meaning from the spatial to the more abstract. This analysis articulates an alternative methodology that distinguishes between a conventional meaning and an interpretation produced for understanding the preposition in context, as well as establishing which of several competing senses should be taken as the primary sense. Together, the methodology and framework are sufficiently articulated to generate testable predictions and allow the analysis to be applied to additional prepositions.

Prepositions and cases constitute a fruitful field of research for semantics. The historical development of their meaning can shed light on the relations among the semantic roles of participants and on the organization of conceptual space. Ancient Greek allows an in-depth study of such development. The book, based on a wide, diachronically ordered corpus, aims at providing a usage-based analysis of possible patterns of semantic extension, including the mapping of abstract domains onto the concrete domain of space. An analysis of the Greek data further highlights the interplay between specific spatial relations and the internal structure of the entities involved, and shows how case semantics may account for differences on the referential level, rather than merely express clause internal relations. The first chapter contains a typologically based discussion of semantic roles, which sets the language-specific analysis in a wider framework, showing its general relevance and applicability.

A Cognitive Perspective on Spatial Prepositions: Intertwining networks is devoted to the issue of the relation between language and thought approached from the perspective of spatial relations encoded by four equivalent spatial prepositions – English to, German zu, Polish do and Russian к. Regarding these prepositions as path-prepositions, the authors show that the prepositional semantic structures are conceptually grounded in the PATH and the MOTION-EVENT frames and explain that prepositional senses emerge as a result of the PATH image schema transformations and metaphorical mappings related to the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor. Based on their findings, the authors show how senso-motoric functioning, life experience, individual knowledge, imagery and different ways in which people conceptualize the world influence the relation between language and conceptualization.

Based on data from a wide range of languages, the book discusses the ways in which case interacts with meaning.

Traditional semantic description of Ancient Greek prepositions has struggled to synthesize the varied and seemingly arbitrary uses into something other than a disparate, sometimes overlapping list of senses. The Cognitive Linguistic approach of prototype theory holds that the meanings of a preposition are better explained as a semantic network of related senses that radially extend from a primary, spatial sense. These radial extensions arise from contextual factors that affect the metaphorical representation of the spatial scene that is profiled. Building upon the Cognitive Linguistic descriptions of Bortone (2009) and Luraghi (2009), linguists, biblical scholars, and Greek lexicographers apply these developments to offer more in-depth descriptions of select postclassical Greek prepositions and consider the exegetical and lexicographical implications of these findings. This volume will be of interest to those studying or researching the Greek of the New Testament seeking more linguistically-informed description of prepositional semantics, particularly with a focus on the exegetical implications of choice among seemingly similar prepositions in Greek and the challenges of potentially mismatched translation into English.

This completely revised and expanded edition of English Prepositions Explained (EPE), originally published in 1998, covers approximately 100 simple, compound, and phrasal English prepositions of space and time – with the focus being on short prepositions such as at, by, in, and on. Its target readership includes teachers of ESOL, pre-service translators and interpreters, undergraduates in English linguistics programs, studious advanced learners and users of English, and anyone who is inquisitive about the English language. The overall aim is to explain how and why meaning changes when one preposition is swapped for another in the same context. While retaining most of the structure of the original, this edition says more about more prepositions. It includes many more figures – virtually all new. The exposition draws on recent research, and is substantially founded on evidence from digitalized corpora, including frequency data. EPE gives information and insights that will not be found in dictionaries and grammar handbooks.

This book explores the context around why English prepositions are used in figurative language more frequently than nouns and verbs, using corpus-based evidence to examine the most often used prepositions and how they are employed and for what purpose. While research on cognitive approaches to metaphor has significantly expanded in recent decades, little attention has been paid to prepositions as vehicles of figurative language, owing to their polysemous, complex, and inconsistent nature. To bridge this gap, Ounis introduces an innovative conceptual framework that integrates conceptual metaphor theory, diachronic linguistics, and discourse pragmatics. Drawing upon an extensive corpus of American presidential inaugural addresses, this book considers the linguistic, conceptual, pragmatic, and contextual dimensions of English prepositions, revealing the fascinating interplay between language, culture, and cognition. This volume will be of interest to scholars in pragmatics, metaphor studies, English language, rhetoric studies, and historical linguistics.

This striking study of the meaning and use of the major spatial prepositions in French provides valuable insight into how the human mind organizes spatial relationships. Most previous analyses of spatial prepositions have assumed that their semantic properties can be adequately explained by familiar logical and geometrical concepts. Thus, the standard view of the preposition "in" as it appears in the sentence "the ball is in the bag" postulates that it refers to the geometrical relation of inclusion. This paradigm, however, falters when faced with the contrast in acceptability between sentences such as "the bulb is in the socket" and "the bottle is in the cap." The force exerted by the "landmark" (a conceptually fixed object) on the "target" (a moveable object) is crucial in this difference: the functional notion of containment seems more operational in the use of the preposition "in" than inclusion. That is, what are taken to be the landmark and the target depend greatly on the functions these objects serve in the human scheme. This offers important clues to otherwise problematic linguistic quirks, such as why one sleeps in one's bed, while one is said to lie on one's deathbed. While many of the examples apply in English as well as French, there are some noteworthy differences—in French one sits on a chair, but in a couch. Vandeloise convincingly argues that it is precisely this subjective element which makes a standard geometrical account unfeasible.

Metaphorical Landscapes and the Theology of the Book of Job demonstrates how spatial metaphors play a crucial role in the theology of the book of Job. Themes as pivotal as trauma, ill-being, retribution, and divine character are conceptualized in terms of space; its imagery is thus dependent on spatial configurations, such as boundaries, distance, direction, containment, and contact. Not only are spatial metaphors ubiquitous in the book of Job—possibly the most frequent conceptual metaphors in the book—they are essential to its theological reasoning. Job’s spatial metaphors form a metaphorical landscape in which God’s character and his creation are challenged in unprecedented ways. In the theophany, God reacts to that landscape. This book introduces a pragmatic synthesis of both conceptual metaphor theory and spatial semantics and it demonstrates their exegetical and hermeneutic potential.