On the Motivated Polysemy of the Lithuanian ŽEMIAU ‘below’

Authors

  • Ieva Stasiūnaitė Vilnius University, Faculty of Philology

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.32.19290

Keywords:

prepositions, motivated polysemy, Lithuanian, figure, ground

Abstract

The principle of motivated polysemy advocated by cognitively-oriented linguists has been applied in the analysis of English prepositions. However, other languages, especially highly inflected languages, received less attention. 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 (Tyler & Evans 2003). Results of the study reveal that the primary sense based on a proto-spatial scene of the Figure (F) underneath the region of the Ground (G) functions as a derivational basis for a network of senses. The investigation demonstrates that the senses only partially overlap with the ones given in dictionary entries.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.32.0.19290

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Published

2018-05-18

Issue

No. 32 (2018)

Section

LINGUISTICS

License

The copyright for the articles in this journal is retained by the author(s) with the first publication right granted to the journal. The journal is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).