Comparing force prepositions with spatial prepositions
Comparing force prepositions with spatial prepositions

Summary/Abstract: The traditional semantic approach to prepositions is that they express spatial relations. In this article, I criticize this ‘localist’ position by arguing that many prepositions build on forces as their primary semantic domain. I compare prepositions that depend on the force domain to those that depend on the spatial domain. I argue that most typical uses of the prepositions ‘over’, ‘on’ and ‘in’ depend on the force domain, in contrast to ‘above’, ‘on top of ’ and ‘inside’ that are corresponding spatial prepositions. Also ‘against’, ‘under’, and ‘at’ have force related meanings. My analysis of English is compared with some examples from Bulgarian and other languages. I propose a rotation test for determining the primary domain of a preposition. This test states that if the use of a preposition for a particular relation between the trajectory and the landmark is invariant under rotation, then the meaning of the preposition is non-spatial.

• Details
• Contents