One face, two facets: the Modern Greek complex prepositions brosta se and brosta apo
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2012/05/0025/000231Keywords:
spatial cognition, spatial prepositions, front half- axis, Modern GreekAbstract
Languages differ substantially in the spatial concepts they choose to encode (Talmy 2000, Levinson 2003). This pilot study explores concepts related to the transversal (FRONT/BACK) axis in Modern Greek. As opposed to languages such as English (in front of) or German (vor), Greek allows two grammaticalized options for the localization of an entity in the front half-axis: the complex prepositions brosta se and brosta apo. Contrary to recent semantic analyses of Greek prepositions (Bortone 2010), our findings show that these options are not semantically equivalent. More specifically, our production data indicate that, within the complex preposition, the morphemes se and apo may mark distinct viewpoints on the same front subspace, a view that has been previously argued based on corpus data (Skopeteas 1999).
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