Browsing by Subject "Prepositions"
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Item Preposition typology with manner of motion verbs in Spanish(2013-12) Bassa Vanrell, Maria del Mar; Beavers, John T.Spanish, as a V(erb)-framed language (Talmy 1985), is expected to lexicalize the path of motion in the verb and manner in some satellite when it comes to the description of motion events. Nonetheless, it shows mixed properties (e.g. Aske 1989, Berman & Slobin 1994). All manner of motion verbs can take a path satellite introduced by the prepositions "hacia" and "hasta", and yet only some can take a path satellite introduced by the preposition "a." I claim that goal XPs introduced by "hasta" and "hacia" are adjuncts, whereas "a" is an argument marker. In order to capture the intermediacy of a verb’s ability to take a goal XP, I classify manner of motion verbs according to a three-way distinction that takes into account whether they encode path categorically, overwhelmingly, or only sometimes, and whether they lexically reject the notion of a goal. Finally, I posit verb coercion—under certain semantic and pragmatic conditions—of manner of motion verbs that strongly or categorically favor displacement in order to express a goal. These semantic/pragmatic influential factors are reduced to (i) degree of manner and (ii) degree of goal-orientedness.Item Redefining three Old Saxon prepositions(2010-08) Laborde, Thomas Adams; Pierce, Marc; Boas, HansThis paper expands upon the work done by Cathey (2002) in his Hêliand: Text and Commentary by examining three Old Saxon prepositions defined in his glossary as “prepositions with various meanings.” By examining the contexts in which these prepositions occur and the substantial body of German scholarship on the issue, in particular Sehrt (1925), Sievers (1878), and Behaghel (1897), as well as English translations such as Murphy (1992) and Scott (1966), sets of possible English glosses for each of these three prepositions can be established.Item The semantic import of the French preposition à 'at/to' in verbal argument alternations(2013-05) Mignot, Charles Alexandre; Léger, Catherine; Russi, Cinzia, 1966-This study examines the semantic import of the French preposition à 'at/to' in argument alternations. In French, some verbs can be followed by a direct object or by an indirect object introduced by the preposition à 'at/to' (e.g., parer/parer à 'to ward off/to guard against', satisfaire/satisfaire à 'to satisfy', toucher/toucher à 'to touch', etc.). Although the preposition à 'at/to' has been characterized in the literature as a meaningless grammatical element, and more specifically so in cases of argument alternations, this study shows that à 'at/to' is meaningful and that it contributes to the semantics of the indirect transitive constructions of the verbs under scrutiny. Couched in the Cognitive Grammar theoretical framework (Langacker 1987b, 1991), this study is based on the assumption that grammar is meaningful and that the meaning of grammatical items is more abstract than the meaning of lexical items. Consequently, two abstract meanings characterizing à 'at/to' are proposed to account for the semantic differences between the direct and indirect transitive constructions of the verbs analyzed in this study: the expression of an abstract goal and the expression of an abstract localization. For some verbs, the indirect transitive construction entails a notion of goal that is not expressed in the direct transitive construction. For other verbs, à 'at/to' expresses an abstract relation (i.e., an abstract localization) between the lexical semantics of the verb and the indirect object, which results in meaning differences between the direct and indirect transitive constructions based on the notion of affectedness. Following Langacker (1987a), I view transitivity as a transfer of energy and propose that the various levels of energy involved in an event correlate with the various levels of affectedness of the object. I argue that à 'at/to' signals a disruption of energy leading to a lower affectedness of the indirect object than that of the direct object (see also Beavers 2011). Finally, I show that, for the verb toucher 'to touch', the semantic import of à 'at/to' varies in relation to the various senses of the indirect transitive construction of the verb.