engleski

English, Croatian and Italian Preposition from a Cognitive Perspective. When ‘ at’ is ‘ on’ and ‘ on’ is ‘ in’

This dissertation is premised on the idea that words do not represent atomic units of meaning but could, and should, rather, be seen as made out of smaller, more elementary, semantic components. This premise is explored on the case of three basic spatial prepositions (or rather the semantics of the spatial relations expressed by the English 'at', 'on' and 'in'), which are analysed in 34 world languages. The apparent crosslinguistic diversities in the portioning of these semantic fields are systematized and explained in terms of a small number of conceptual domains.

prepositions; language; space; cognition; universality vs. relativity

nije evidentirano