Prepositional Phrases of a Path

2014

This thesis belongs to the research tradition of Romance historical semantics, and combines diachronic methods with cognitive hypotheses. Analysing complex adpositions in French and Italian, its originality resides in the fact that, both for literal and metaphorical uses, it applies a functional approach to a diachronic problematic, carrying out a corpus analysis. The period covered consists of four hundred years (from the 16th until the end of the 19th Century). The constructions under analysis conform to the pattern [PREP1 (+ article) + travers(o) (+ PREP2)], viz. the French expressions 'à travers (de)', 'au travers (de)', 'en travers (de)', 'de travers' and their Italian formal equivalents 'a traverso'/'at(t)raverso (a, di, per)', 'al traverso (di)', 'in traverso (di)' and 'di traverso (a)' ('traverso (a)', without PREP1, is included too). These expressions, and especially their prepositional uses, are assumed to be intrinsically dynamic. However, they are no pure prepositions, in that all of them can be used in at least two different syntactic roles. More specifically, some are principally found as a preposition, and secondarily as an adverb; others behave mostly as an adverb, but also as an adjective; finally, certain expressions exhibit all three types of uses. The results can be structured around four axes. Firstly, a complete diachronic-semantic description of all uses is given of this set of hardly explored expressions, in order to contribute to a better comprehension of their semantic structure. The study bears on morphological, syntactic, but most of all semantic aspects of the evolutions observed. Secondly, functional concepts such as Guidance, proposed in synchronic research (in particular by Stosic (2002b; 2007; 2009)), and notions we elaborate on the basis of research on Modern French (cf. Somers 1988; and Plungian 2002), in particular Contrast and Deviation, are put to the test. By adopting a diachronic perspective, we assess to what extent these notions are able to describe the semantics conveyed in the past by the expressions under study. Thirdly, this thesis determines in what measure the expressions analysed were subjected to a grammaticalisation process, and why some of them (in particular 'à travers', and, to a lesser extent, 'a traverso'/'at(t)raverso (a, di, per)') became significantly more frequent from the 18th Century onwards. We provide elements that point to a more advanced grammaticalisation for certain expressions. Moreover, we determine to what extent the evolutionary trends observed corroborate or, on the contrary, disconfirm various mechanisms considered to be part of the process of grammaticalisation. Finally, a comparison between the evolutions in the two languages under study helps to distinguish between more general and language-specific mechanisms of semantic and grammatical evolution, given that every natural language has a specific way of organising its own modelling of space. The results of this study enrich our knowledge of the phrases studied and their functioning in the past, but also in present-day French and Italian, providing diachronic observations regarding the functional notions put to the test. Further, it contributes to a better understanding of the grammaticalisation mechanisms of complex constructions. Finally, it shows that typologically related languages may evolve differently in their ways of representing space, and in particular in their semantic distribution of various functional concepts within a group of close constructions.

2014

An account of spatial semantics cannot fail to encompass three basic notions: location, change of location, and shape. While shapes can be considered to be properties of objects with a spatial dimension, locations and paths are relations between such objects. Most of the semantic and morphosyntactic literature, therefore concentrates on locations and paths. Without pursuing the intricacies of the semantics and logic of these notions, we take them to be basic and address the question of how these notions are reflected in syntax and morphology. There are indeed languages in which there is a direct grammatical correlate of the notions location and path. Accordingly, and following Jackendoff (1983) and Koopman (1993), we take the abstract structure of a spatial phrase in the verbal domain to be [V ' V o [PP DIR o [P ' LOC o [N ' N o] ] ]]. Our purpose here is to present new evidence for such a structure based on locality considerations. A robust notion of locality (heads ...

Cognitive Processing, 2009

This paper describes a psycholinguistic experiment that investigates whether the applicability of the topological spatial prepositions "at", "on" or "in" to describe the spatial configuration between two objects is related to the topological relationships between objects being described.

2009

Language, 2003

Most approaches to spatial language have assumed that the simplest spatial notions are (after Piaget) topological and universal (containment, contiguity, proximity, support, represented as semantic primitives such as IN, ON, UNDER, etc.). These concepts would be coded directly in language, above all in small closed classes such as adpositions--thus providing a striking example of semantic categories as language-specific projections of universal conceptual notions. This idea, if correct, should have as a consequence that the semantic categories instantiated in spatial adpositions should be essentially uniform crosslinguistically. This article attempts to verify this possibility by comparing the semantics of spatial adpositions in nine unrelated languages, with the help of a standard elicitation procedure, thus producing a preliminary semantic typology of spatial adpositional systems. The differences between the languages turn out to be so significant as to be incompatible with stronger versions of the UNIVERSAL CONCEPTUAL CATEGORIES hypothesis. Rather, the language-specific spatial adposition meanings seem to emerge as compact subsets of an underlying semantic space, with certain areas being statistical ATTRACTORS or FOCI. Moreover, a comparison of systems with different degrees of complexity suggests the possibility of positing implicational hierarchies for spatial adpositions. But such hierarchies need to be treated as successive divisions of semantic space, as in recent treatments of basic color terms. This type of analysis appears to be a promising approach for future work in semantic typology.* A DISTILLATION OF HUMAN SPATIAL COGNITION. In studies of spatial language, a standard line or set of orthodox assumptions has arisen, along the following lines: 1. The simplest spatial notions are topological-concepts of proximity, contiguity, containment (Piaget & Inhelder 1956). 2. Such notions can be taken to be either primitive, so that we have conceptual primes like IN, ON, UNDER (Jackendoff 1983), or near-primitive, so that, for example, IN is decomposed in terms of at least partial INCLUSION (Miller & Johnson-Laird 1976). 3. These concepts are more or less directly coded in spatial language, above all in the closed-class spatial relators like prepositions and postpositions, which have (comparatively) simple semantics (Talmy 1983), largely universal in nature since they correspond to elements of our neurocognition (Landau & Jackendoff 1993). Consequently, 'we can develop a fairly comprehensive idea of the spatial relations expressed in language by focusing on spatial prepositions' (Landau & Jackendoff 1993:223). 4. Hence, the topological adpositions are among the earliest linguistic concepts learned by children (Johnston & Slobin 1979), and in learning them children map * Colleagues in the Language and Cognition Group who provided crucial data are: Jtirgen Bohnemeyer,