Juznoslovenski filolog 2012 Issue 68, Pages: 91-111
https://doi.org/10.2298/JFI1268091D
Full text ( 197 KB)
On nouns functioning as prepositions
Dragićević Rajna M. (Filološki fakultet, Katedra za srpski jezik, Beograd)
This paper analyzes semantic transformations of nouns functioning as
prepositions. The semantic characteristics of prepositions are discussed, and
Belic’ concept of adverbial origin and meaning of prepositions is reviewed.
Contrary to usual perception that prepositions have mere grammatical meaning,
it is concluded in this paper that they also have lexical meaning, like
adverbs. Cognitive linguistics has so far dealt with lexical meanings of
prepositions, and it is up to contemporary semantics to further explore and
evolve this approach. Based on this fact that prepositions have lexical
meaning, it is argued that nouns functioning as prepositions retain that
lexical attribute though with different semantic value, rather than it adopts
grammatical characteristics. It is concluded that semantic meaning of those
nouns used as prepositions could be broken into two segments: adverbial
(place) and nominal (partitive). The nouns which upon occasions may function
as prepositions in Serbian language as a rule denote place and they always
are used with genitive case (mostly partitive), and as a consequence they
often have partitive meaning. In the sentences with nouns functioning as
prepositions, the act expressed encompasses the part of the localizator or it
is performed on its bounds, or near it. Which meaning would prevail depends
on the noun, or verb, or noun in genitive case. A noun and its related
preposition are treated as two lexemes in Serbian descriptive dictionaries,
independent but close in meanings, since the preposition originated from a
noun in a process defined by Irena Grickat as grammar polysemy, i.e. a
polysemy with the grammatical result. In some grammar books identical forms
of a preposition and nominative and accusative noun forms are defined as
homophoria, and those prepositions and nouns are called homophores. Since
homophoria is a type of homonymy, and homonymy excludes semantic relation
between lexemes, the term homophoria had to be discarded. It is suggested in
this paper that only few nouns in Serbian language can function as
prepositions due to fact that only those few have possibility to combine
semantically high-productive spaciality with partitivity (rarely
possessiveness), as a result of their obligatory usage with partitive
(sometimes, possessive) genitive. The usage of nouns as prepositions in
Serbian language is slowly going out because their semantics is imprecise,
and in certain circumstances difficult to differentiate, which means that the
process of transformation of nouns into prepositions was not complete. Thus,
more frequent today are compound prepositions formed by a real preposition
and a noun (navrh, uvrh, podno). Their semantics is more distinctive and more
precise due to real preposition as constituents.
Keywords: nouns, prepositions, prepositionalization, grammaticalization, grammatical polysemy, semantics, Serbian language
Projekat Ministarstva nauke
Republike Srbije, br. 178021: Opis i standardizacija savremenog srpskog
jezika