On the Meaning of the Lithuanian Preposition po: A Cognitive Perspective

Abstract

Studies of prepositional meaning are rather prolific in cognitive linguistics. However, the Lithuanian po ‘under’ still relies on intuitive explication rather than corpus-based evidence, reflecting the traditional line of investigation. Thus, the present paper focuses on: (1) identifying the primary sense of the preposition; (2) examining its extensions, or major use types, in physical and non-physical contexts, and (3) linking the established senses that differ in status in the form of a network. 1000 concordance lines with po from the fiction segment in the Corpus of Contemporary Lithuanian Language were examined. The Principled Polysemy Model (Tyler, Evans 2003) was used to distinguish between the senses and their contextual variants as well as for primary sense identification. Contextual clues played a significant role as well. The findings show that the primary sense, based on a proto-scene of the Figure beneath the Ground, gives rise to the other senses of the preposition. Some of them are concrete – differentiated by the types of F and G and their geometric and/or functional relationships, while the other extensions are abstract and motivated by metaphor. The paper also considers how the meaning of po interacts with the noun cases it governs.