On the Motivated Polysemy of the Lithuanian ŽEMIAU Below
On the Motivated Polysemy of the Lithuanian ŽEMIAU Below

Summary/Abstract: The principle of motivated polysemy advocated by cognitively-oriented linguists has been mostly applied in the analysis of English prepositions. However, other languages, especially highly inflected ones, have received less attention. Therefore, the present paper demonstrates how the principle works on a selected preposition in Lithuanian. It aims at: (1) establishing different senses of žemiau “below” as (2) related in a single network. The data is retrieved from the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian Language and analysed according to the Principled Polysemy Model suggested by Tyler & Evans (2003). Results of the study reveal that the primary sense, which is based on a proto-spatial scene of the Figure (F) underneath the region of the Ground (G), functions as a direct or indirect derivational basis for a network of senses, both in concrete and abstract domains. The investigation demonstrates that the newly established senses only partially overlap with the ones given in Lithuanian dictionary entries.

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