EESTI KAASSÕNADE TÄHENDUSTE KIRJELDAMISE PROBLEEMIDEST
A Cognitive Semantic Analysis of the Estonian Adpositions üle ‘over’ and peale ‘on, onto’: Some Questions and Queries

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with how to describe the meanings of Estonian adpositions üle ‘over’ and peale ‘on, onto’ by means of cognitive semantics. Empirical methods for determining central senses of adpositions are taken into consideration. Data from corpora (both synchronic and diachronic) and production tests are presented and compared. According to Sandra and Rice 1995, it is relevant to distinguish between spatial, abstract and temporal usage types of adpositions (as language users make clear-cut differences between spatial and temporal domains). Traditionally, radial network models of the polysemy of adpositions have placed spatial usage in the middle of the network. Grammaticalization of bodypart terms into locative expressions is quite a typical feature of Estonian. Peale is formed of the body-part noun pea ‘head’ and the allative case marker -le (‘onto’), and indeed, this kind of transparent formation can be regarded as an argument for the centrality or prototypicality of spatial uses. At the same time, analysis of Old Literary Estonian shows that in the religious texts from the 17th and 18th century üle and peale are mostly used for expressing abstract relations. The data on linguistic frequency (based on the Corpus of Estonian Literary Language) suggest that the prototypicality or centrality of adpositional meaning is primarily connected with abstract uses. Although subjects in the production tests generally tended to produce more sentences with abstract meanings, spontaneous production tests (especially with schoolchildren) elicited primarily spatial meanings. My solution for the polysemy network of Estonian üle and peale is presented as an image-schematic model with three perspectives, respectively accounting for the usages in spatial, temporal and abstract domains. As language users, we take advantage of our physical ability to see things in the world from various perspectives in creating and understanding the meanings of a polysemous word. Thus, the three perspectives of the image-schemas for üle and peale represent our ability to view a whole situation from different perspectives in spatial, temporal and other domains.

• Details
• Contents