Project 9

Functions and cognitive semantics of prepositions in complex constructions

This project focuses on the study of the German prepositions auf and an as governed by nouns, adjectives and verbs along with their corresponding translations in English, Polish, and Ukrainian. The study collects data from the Langenscheidt Großwörterbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache (3rd edition, 2019) and uses multiple dictionaries and corpus data to analyze translations, aiming to identify commonalities and differences in the usage of these prepositions across the languages.

Traditionally, it has often been argued that governed prepositions tend to lose their semantic value when they are governed by nouns, adjectives or verbs (e.g. Duden-Grammatik, 2005). For instance, in such expressions as warten auf ‘wait for’, Hoffnung auf ‘hope for’, stolz auf ‘proud of’ the preposition auf is claimed not to express its intrinsic meaning, i.e. to be meaningless or meaning-neutral.

Inspired by the developments in Cognitive Linguistics since the 1970s, this study investigates whether governed prepositions maintain meaningfulness, as indicated in Zeschel’s (2019) research on verbal Argument Structure Construction (ASCs) involving vor in German. This approach aligns with Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) findings on spatialization metaphors, suggesting that the primary spatial meaning of prepositions like vor extends metaphorically and metonymically. Our research extends these concepts to auf and an in German, examining whether their translations in English, Polish, and Ukrainian demonstrate similar metaphorical and metonymic connections.

Preliminary results have highlighted varying linguistic strategies across languages, as described by Croft (2022), indicating a rich diversity in expressing semantic content. The project aims to discern cross-linguistic parallels or differences in function structuring and to identify strategies for expressing equivalent functions in different languages.

References:

Croft, William. 2022. Morphosyntax. Cambridge University Press

Kunkel-Razum, Kathrin. 2005. Duden, die Grammatik Unentbehrlich Für Richtiges Deutsch. Mannheim: Dudenverl.

Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago and London: University of Chicago press.

Zeschel, Arne. 2019: Zum Bedeutungsgehalt von Präpositionalobjekten: Eine musterbasierte Analyse verbaler Argumentstrukturen mit der Präposition vor. In Konstruktionsgrammatik VI: Varianz in der konstruktionalen Schematizität, D. Czicza, V. Dekalo, & G. Diewald (eds.), 39–77. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.