Chet's cross-linguistic point is supported by substantial research reported by
Bowerman and Choi in a paper in Cognition in about 1991. (It was a special
edition, edd. by Pinker and Levin, and subsequently independently published by
Blackwell.) They showed that space is "covered" in different ways in Korean
and Dutch - not just in the system of prepositional meanings but also in the
ways in which spatial meanings are conflated with verb meanings; the paper was
both a lexical semantic analysis of the lgs *and* an acquisition study, if I
remember correctly. I haven't looked at this paper for over a decade, but I
think they went with core and peripheral meanings (prototypical and less
prototypical). As far as I can tell, the consequence for Dylan's question is
that there is some arbitrariness about preposition selection once you are out
of the domain of core meaning. Easily shown for IN and ON by the observation
that Latin used one preposition for both meanings, didn't it?
Nik.
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