The object of this work will be a selected group of prepositions in English, Polish and Russian which can express spatial relationships? This study focuses on "everyday" usage of the languages in question.
The book presents a comprehensive study of Russian prepositions, with a focus on expressing spatial characteristics. It primarily deals with how metaphorical and metonymical transfers motivate the use of Russian prepositional phrases, explaining the collocations of prepositional phrases with verbs as a realisation of a conceptual metaphor or a metonymy. The author confronts a problem that is attracting growing attention within present-day linguistics: the semantics of prepositions and cases. The book seeks to clarify the conceptual motivations for the use of the combinations of Russian primary prepositional phrases, as well as to demonstrate how their spatial meanings are extended into non-spatial domains. This book incorporates an analysis of a large number of items, including 30 combinations of primary prepositions with cases. An original contribution, the book is of interest to teachers and students studying Slavic languages, and to cognitive linguists.
A Cognitive Perspective on Spatial Prepositions: Intertwining networks is devoted to the issue of the relation between language and thought approached from the perspective of spatial relations encoded by four equivalent spatial prepositions – English to, German zu, Polish do and Russian к. Regarding these prepositions as path-prepositions, the authors show that the prepositional semantic structures are conceptually grounded in the PATH and the MOTION-EVENT frames and explain that prepositional senses emerge as a result of the PATH image schema transformations and metaphorical mappings related to the EVENT STRUCTURE metaphor. Based on their findings, the authors show how senso-motoric functioning, life experience, individual knowledge, imagery and different ways in which people conceptualize the world influence the relation between language and conceptualization.
This book details patterns of language use that can be found in the writing of adult immigrant learners of Norwegian as a second language (L2). Each study draws its data from a single corpus of texts written for a proficiency test of L2 Norwegian by learners representing 10 different first language (L1) backgrounds. The participants of the study are immigrants to Norway and the book deals with the varying levels and types of language difficulties faced by such learners from differing backgrounds. The studies examine the learners’ use of Norwegian in relation to the morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic and pragmatic patterns they produce in their essays. Nearly all the studies in the book rely on analytical methods specifically designed to isolate the effects of the learners’ L1s on their use of L2 Norwegian, and every chapter highlights patterns that distinguish different L1 groups from one another.
The focus of this book is how Slavic languages represent spatial relations, and how spatial cognition and perception influence the understanding and linguistic coding of nonspatial domains. Individual analyses concentrate on the semantics of selected prepositions and cases in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (B/C/S), providing a comparative perspective on other Slavic languages, primarily Russian and Polish. The opening analysis discusses the main theoretical notion - metaphorical extension - exemplifying the relation of spatial usages of linguistic items to non-spatial usages. This is followed by an analysis of the most basic spatial relations, "in-ness" and "on-ness." The meaning network of prepositions equivalent to on and in helps explain the meaning of the cases they combine with: the accusative and locative. Another crucial spatial relation, proximity, is taken into account in the semantic analysis of the B/C/S prepositions kod and pri, their Slavic equivalents, and cases they combine with: the genitive and locative. The next chapter deals with the spatial meaning of the dative case, examining dative's prepositional usages, the bare directional dative in B/C/S, and the semantic relation of the bare directional dative to other meaning domains of this case.
This cutting-edge volume describes the implications of Cognitive Linguistics for the study of second language acquisition (SLA). The first two sections identify theoretical and empirical strands of Cognitive Linguistics, presenting them as a coherent whole. The third section discusses the relevance of Cognitive Linguistics to SLA and defines a research agenda linking these fields with implications for language instruction. Its comprehensive range and tutorial-style chapters make this handbook a valuable resource for students and researchers alike.