On The Meaning Of Prepositions And Cases

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.

Prepositions are important in the exegesis of the Greek New Testament, but they are at the same time very slippery words because they can have so many nuances. While Prepositions and Theology in the Greek New Testament rejects the idea of a “theology of the prepositions,” it is a study of the numerous places in the Greek New Testament where prepositions contribute to the theological meaning of the text. Offered in the hope that it might encourage close study of the Greek text of the New Testament, its many features include the following: Coverage of all 17 “proper” and 42 “improper” prepositions Explores both literary and broader theological contexts Greek font—not transliteration—used throughout Comprehensive indexes to hundreds of verses, subjects, and Greek words Discussion of key repeated phrases that use a particular preposition

This monograph is concerned with prepositional elements in Slavic languages, prepositions, verbal prefixes and functional elements of prepositional nature. It argues that verbal prefixes are incorporated prepositions projecting their argument structure in the complement of the verbal root and that their meaning is based on the two-argument meaning of prepositions, enriched with the CAUSE operator. The book investigates idiomaticity in the realm of prefixed verbs and proposes a novel analysis of non-compositional prefixed verbs based on the operation of predicate transfer. It also offers a uniform analysis of cases. Prepositional as well as non-prepositional cases are treated as a reflection of the agreement operation, whereat the type of prepositional case is determined by semantic properties of the decomposed preposition. Furthermore, it examines prepositions from a diachronic perspective and argues that they can be grammaticalised as future markers under certain circumstances.

This is the most comprehensive history of the Greek prepositional system ever published. It is set within a broad typological context and examines interrelated syntactic, morphological, and semantic change over three millennia. By including, for the first time, Medieval and Modern Greek, Dr Bortone is able to show how the changes in meaning of Greek prepositions follow a clear and recurring pattern of immense theoretical interest. The author opens the book by discussing the relevant background issues concerning the function, meaning, and genesis of adpositions and cases. He then traces the development of prepositions and case markers in ancient Greek (Homeric and classical, with insights from Linear B and reconstructed Indo-European); Hellenistic Greek, which he examines mainly on the basis of Biblical Greek; Medieval Greek, the least studied but most revealing phase; and Modern Greek, in which he also considers the influence of the learned tradition and neighbouring languages. Written in an accessible and non-specialist style, this book will interest classical philologists, as well as historical linguists and theoretical linguists.

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.

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