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Prepositions are one of the tools languages can use to mark and distinguish roles associated with particular semantic frames or grammatical functions. This work studies this phenomenon in Medieval Welsh texts from two angles: a catalog of the functions of prepositions, especially of their more abstract uses, and the cognitive mechanisms by which they are extended to those uses; and an analysis of the variety of motivations for preposition choice, especially when marking significant roles associated with particular verbs or particular semantic frames, and how they compete when multiple motivations are present.
What we find is a systematic hierarchy of motivations:
Beyond the usefulness of such a study in understanding the structures of a particular language, a comparison of studies of this type can contribute to a cross linguistic understanding of cognitive universals. Adpositional language is typically quite variable in how it bundles groups of spatial meaning, even among closely related languages, making it possible to distinguish significant patterns at a more finely-grained level between languages than within a single language. Finding the commonalties in the metaphoric and grammaticalized extensions of spatial language can help identify universal elements among more complex metaphors.
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