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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.
This is the first book to provide an integrated view of preposition from morphology to reasoning, via syntax and semantics. It offers new insights in applied and formal linguistics, and cognitive science. It underlines the importance of prepositions in a number of computational linguistics applications, such as information retrieval and machine translation. The book presents a wide range of views and applications to various linguistic frameworks.
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.
The growing interest in prepositions is reflected by this impressive collection of papers from leading scholars of various fields. The selected contributions of Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context focus on the local and temporal semantics of prepositions in relation to their context, too. Following an introduction which puts this new approach into a thematical and historical perspective, the volume presents fifteen studies in the following areas: The semantics of space dynamics (mainly on French prepositions); Language acquisition (aphasia and code-switching); Artificial intelligence (mainly of English prepositions); Specific languages: Hebrew (from a number of perspectives — syntax, semiotics, and sociolinguistic impact on morphology), Maltese, the Melanesian English-based Creole Bislama, and Biblical translations into Judeo-Greek.
The present book covers various aspects of prepositional syntax between c. 900-1400, including case relations and the range of prepositional complements; it also examines word order, both within the PP and at clause level, and it explores changes in clausal word order. Furthermore, it provides a detailed semantic analysis of the three prepositions at, in and on in selected Old and Middle English texts, which shows to what extent the relative distribution of these prepositions changed during that period and how they gradually acquired new, extended senses.The front cover illustration renders the 895 entry of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Parker Ms., and has been reproduced with the permission of the Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
This book is a collection of articles which deal with adpositions in a variety of languages and from a number of perspectives. Not only does the book cover what is traditionally treated in studies from a European and Semitic orientation – prepositions, but it presents studies on postpositions, too. The main languages dealt with in the collection are English, French and Hebrew, but there are articles devoted to other languages including Korean, Turkic languages, Armenian, Russian and Ukrainian. Adpositions are treated by some authors from a semantic perspective, by others as syntactic units, and a third group of authors distinguishes adpositions from the point of view of their pragmatic function. This work is of interest to students and researchers in theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as to those who have a special interest in any of the languages treated.
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.
Our use of spatial prepositions carries an implicit understanding of the functional relationships both between objects themselves and human interaction with those objects. This is the thesis rigorously explicated in Saying, Seeing and Acting. It aims to account not only for our theoretical comprehension of spatial relations but our ability to intercede with efficacy in the world of spatially related objects. Only the phenomenon of functionality can adequately account for what even the simplest of everyday experiences show to be the technically problematic, but still meaningful status of expressions of spatial location in contentious cases. The terms of the debate are established and contextualised in Part One. In the Second Section, systematic experimental evidence is drawn upon to demonstrate specific covariances between spatial world and spatial language. The authors go on to give an original account of the functional and geometric constraints on which comprehension and human action among spatially related objects is based. Part Three looks at the interaction of these constraints to create a truly dynamic functional geometric framework for the meaningful use of spatial prepositions. Fascinating to anyone whose work touches on psycholinguistics, this book represents a thorough and incisive contribution to debates in the cognitive psychology of language.
A reconsideration of the semantics of a lexical category--prepositions--that has recently witnessed a plethora of investigations. The volume approaches the issue first from a more general perspective, namely the extent to which insights into the meaning of prepositions give clues to the semantic structure of lexical units and its processing in general. It goes on to deal with the meaning of prepositions from the perspective of how natural language processing can benefit from the insights of theoretical linguistics, especially with respect to machine translation and image understanding. Most of the papers were originally presented at a workshop held in February 1990 at the Institut fur Angewandte Informationsforschung. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR