Co znaczy „po”? Empiryczne poszukiwanie głównego znaczenia przyimka „po”
What does “po” mean? The empirical quest for the main meaning of the Polish preposition “po”

Summary/Abstract: The article reports on a simple psycholinguistic experiment which aimed to reveal the main meaning of the Polish preposition “po” on the basis of example sentences provided by informants. The inspiration comes from Taylor’s (1989) description of a similar experiment as well as discrepancies between the analyses of “po” to date. The concept of main meaning adopted in the article is that of immediate association with the word. The experiment is a way of objectivizing this subjective criterion. The results show that “succession in time” (in English expressed by after) is the main meaning of “po”. This largely contradicts earlier cognitive analyses which assume the spatial domain to be basic and hence take the spatial meaning of “po” as the main one.

• Details
• Contents