Investigating and Analyzing the Locative Preposition "Below" With a Cognitive Linguistics Approach

Prepositions, as a group of frequent and important grammatical words, play an important role in many languages, including Persian. The aim of the present study is to examine the polysemy of the preposition “bellow” within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics approach and based on two theories of Principled Polysemy (Tyler and Evans, 2001, 2003) and Image Schemas (Johnson, 1987). The research data includes a set of Persian sentences and phrases containing the preposition “bellow” that were extracted from the Hamshahri corpus (second edition). In addition to this corpus, two dictionaries, Dehkhoda and Moein, were also used. The results of the research show that the preposition "bellow" in its primary and prototype meaning expresses a situation in which an object (trajector) is located in a lower position than another object (landmark) in terms of spatial position in the vertical direction, between which there may or may not be a distance and one may or may not cover the other. In addition, "bellow" also has three meanings: "less", "dominance and control", and "influenceability", which are the result of a metaphorical expansion of the prototype meaning.



1. Introduction

The number of prepositions is usually very small in different languages of the world, but they play a very important role in the language, because they are both high in frequency and play a key role in the formation of many linguistic phrases and sentences. Cognitive study of prepositions of place domain, which is one of the most important and primary cognitive areas, can be an important approach in understanding cognitive meanings and metaphors derived from it.

The aim of the present study is to examine the polysemy of the preposition “bellow” in Persian within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics and based on the theory of Image Schemas and Principled Polysemy. The research data, which include various uses of this preposition in real texts, were extracted from two dictionaries Dehkhoda and Moein, as well as from the Hamshahri corpus.

In this study, the main question is: What is the semantic network of the preposition "bellow" in Persian?



2. Literature Review

Most research on prepositional ambiguity from a cognitive linguistics perspective has been influenced by Tyler and Evans' (2003) research in this field. For example, Tyler et al. (2011) conducted an experimental study to investigate the effect of the Cognitive Semantic approach in teaching the three prepositions to, for, and at. After comparing the results of the pre-test and post-test, they found that the scores of advanced English learners increased significantly as a result of teaching the aforementioned prepositions based on the polysemy network and cognitive linguistics findings.

Brenda (2014) analyzed the polysemy of prepositions by analyzing 417 sentences from spoken and written English, 162 of which contained the preposition over. After analyzing the syntactic and semantic aspects of over, she concluded that, contrary to the opinion of some researchers, the preposition cannot be considered an empty word without meaning, but rather it should be considered a morphological-lexical unit. By examining the polysemy of over based on the model proposed by Tyler and Evans (2003), Brenda showed that most of the meanings of this preposition are the result of the expansion of its initial and prototypical meanings, which are often spatial and geometric.



3. Methodology

This research is considered a corpus study in terms of data collection method and its data were collected from the Hamshahri corpus (second edition) as well as the Dehkhoda, Moein and Sokhan dictionaries. In terms of analysis method, it is a descriptive-analytical type that is carried out within the framework of Cognitive Semantics and based on the theories of Principled Polysemy (Taylor and Evans, 2001, 2003) and Image Schemas (Johnson, 1987). In order to collect data, the word “bellow” was searched in the Hamshahri corpus and among the cases found, those that were used as prepositions were selected as research data. Then, based on the mentioned theories, different meanings of this preposition, including the central meaning (or prototype) and marginal meanings, were discovered.



4. Results

The results of the study indicate that the preposition “bellow” in its primary and prototype meaning expresses a situation in which an object (trajector) is located in a lower position than another object (landmark) in terms of spatial position in the vertical direction, between which there may or may not be a distance and one may or may not cover the other. In addition to this prototype meaning, the preposition “bellow” also has three meanings “lesser”, “dominance and control”, and “influenceability”, which are considered metaphorical extensions of the prototype meaning. As Bratož (2014) points out, the abstract meanings of prepositions are often extensions of their spatial meanings and, as a result, are unpredictable and arbitrary, but are systematically related to each other.

The concept of “lesser” is related to the metaphor “lesser is lower”, and thus the spatial preposition bellow refers to the concept of being less. The meaning of "dominance and control" is also the result of a metaphorical expansion of the prototype meaning and refers to domination and control over something that is under something else. The meaning of "influence" is also the result of a metaphorical expansion of the prortotype meaning and conveys being under the influence and being influenced by something upstream. In this way, the systematic relationship of these marginal meanings with the meaning of the prototype becomes clear.