Guarddon Anelo, María del Carmen (2009). The Natural Semantic Metalanguage of Old English compound adpositions. ES: Revista de filología inglesa, 30, 61-84. PDF (open access)
This paper examines the lexical content of a number of complex adpositions in Old English and the semantic processes that have produced them. Specifically, I have analyzed the complex adpositions that have in, on and at as controlling elements. The theoretical framework used is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. The semantic primes put forward within this model are used to approach four fundamental aspects: 1) The senses of the component elements that are inherited by the complex adposition and the senses that are blocked; 2) The new senses which were not present in the component elements but arise in the process; 3) The potential semantic incompatibilities that prevent the combination of some adpositions and 4) The internal syntactic organization found in these complex adpositions.
This paper is also concerned with the more general issue of the diachronic evolution of the complex adpositions under analysis. I attempt to unveil the semantic factors that have led to the disappearance of some of these adpositions while others have survived to present-day English.
On the whole, the main goal of this paper is to demonstrate that the explanation of the combinatorial properties of spatial primes can serve to
shed light upon aspects of the grammar of space that have not been clarified yet by the Cognitive Linguistics framework.
No actual explications are put forward in this paper.
