Cienki Alan J. Spatial Cognition and the Semantics of Prepositions in English, Polish and Russian

München: Verlag Otto Sagner. — 1989. — 185 p. — ISBN: 3-87690-421-8This work is primarily devoted to explicating uses of the basic English, Polish, and Russian contact prepositions: correspondents to in, on, at. In this reworked version of the author's doctoral dissertation at Brown. Cienki confronts a matter that has no doubt occurred to ever)' English-speaking student of Polish or Russian: there appears to be no coherent system of correspondences as to the use of even the most basic of spatial prepositions. One can describe correspondences through simple enumeration of prepositions and the nouns they take, as Levin recently did with the Russian prepositions v and na (RLJ 145/146), or attempt to account for them conceptually and systematically, as Cienki attempts to, both within and across these three languages.Preface and AcknowledgmentsPreliminaries
Trends of previous semantic studies of spatial prepositions
Insufficiencies of the standard approaches
Hypotheses to be consideredThe frameworkGeometric descriptions
Semantic Conditions
Pragmatics
Use types
On comprehension and productionPlace-functions and Prepositions of Direct LocationSpecific direct location
General direct locationPath-functionsLatives — Dynamic equivalents to the prepositions of location
Adlative PathsConcluding issues
On how English. Polish, and Russian structure space
The potential for extending the analysis