Mostovaja, Anna D. (1998). On emotions that one can “immerse into”, “fall into” and “come to”: The semantics of a few Russian prepositional constructions. In Angeliki Athanasiadou, & Elzbieta Tabakowska (Eds.), Speaking of emotions: Conceptualisation and expression (pp. 295-330). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110806007.295
This paper examines the projection of a few spatial relations such as ‘an object being immersed in a deep container’, ‘a person coming to a place’ and ‘an object located in a place’ into the domain of emotions. In this paper I will attempt to describe what kinds of words referring to emotions and inner states can be treated as containers for those experiencing them in four Russian constructions with the preposition
V ‘in/into’ and different verbs. We will see that although all of these constructions present an emotion experienced by a person as if it were a container or a place, semantic constraints on X are different for
each of the four constructions. Differences in semantic constraints associated with the constructions are caused by differences in meaning between verbs used in the constructions.
