Du spatial au causal : réflexions sur la conceptualisation de la causalité en français et en serbe
From Spatial to Causal: On Conceptualisation of Causality in French and Serbian

Summary/Abstract: The starting point of this paper was the hypothesis that certain segments of the semantic category of causality may be viewed as a metaphor of spatial relations where metaphor is regarded as a cognitive process. In that sense, the paper analyses the prepositional structures introduced by prepositions dans, de, devant, and sous in French, that is, their counterparts in Serbian, prepositions u, od, pred, and pod. The analysis is based on the localistic hypothesis according to which expressions formalising abstract semantic categories are derived from the units of language whose primary function is denoting spatial relations. The paper determined that, semantic localisation may be perceived in cases in which the aforementioned prepositional structures were used to express causal relations, where the consequential situation is the figure, and the causal situation is the ground. In other words, in all the analysed syntactic models, the conceptualisation of spatial relations was transferred to the causality as a more abstract semantic category.

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